Nice Choice! Mobile Sustainability App
Role
Product Designer
Solo, Monash University project
Timeline
12 weeks
Target users
University students aged 18–30
Summary
The Nice Choice! app is a mobile sustainability guide for university students aged 18—30.
The app reduces the time and difficulty required to make informed, sustainable consumption choices.
Objective
Create an online sustainability guide that centralises information and reduces the lack of clarity around what consumption choices are most sustainable.
Project phases
Discovery & Research
→
Ideation
→
Design & Testing
Discovery & Research
Objectives in this phase
Understand broader context of sustainability through research
Uncover and document personal assumptions and mental models related to sustainability and sustainable behaviours through mindmapping
Clarify task domains to focus on and define project scope
Conduct user research with target users to uncover attitudes and behaviours related to sustainability and understand mental models
Analyse user data to find common patterns
Distil insights into digestible insights, including User Personas, that capture different users’ goals, pain points and needs
Validate assumptions based on user data
Activities involved
Secondary research
Mindmapping
5 W’s & H
Generating and defining task domains
User interviews
Data analysis (qualitative research)
Affinity mapping
Task domain analyses
User Personas
Reflection
The problem
Broadly:
Sustainability is a critical global issue
·Sustainability has become a critical global issue to address— human impact on the world needs to be examined and altered so the environment is liveable for future people, flora and fauna.
On an individual level:
It’s unclear what consumer choices are more sustainable
Information about sustainable consumption choices is decentralised
Product labelling relating to sustainability is unclear or absent
Finding out takes time and effort
Consumers need to do their own research from a variety of sources
This takes time and effort
Comparing and remembering which options are more sustainable is a high cognitive load
→
How might we…
Reduce the barriers of time and energy involved in making more sustainable consumer choices?
Ideation → design phase
Objectives
Narrow the scope of the app; choose three key task domains to focus on, which target sustainable behaviours
Visualise and analyse task domains
Conduct further research about how users categorise different products
Conduct mapping to better understand problem and opportunity areas within an experience
Generate and evaluate app feature ideas
Create distinct UI styles and determine approach through preference tests
Create functional, hi-fidelity prototypes
Improve prototypes based on insights from concept testing and usability tests
Artifacts
Experience maps
Task domain analyses
Problem statements, derived through research
How Might We…
User stories
Storyboards
Style tiles
