What is GetGreen?
GetGreen is a mobile app that helps individuals to practice more eco-friendly habits in their daily routines. During the capstone, I worked in a team of four (2 other designers and 1 researcher) to collaborate with the GetGreen co-founders to address low user engagement and retention, navigating the technical constraints of a small development team to design solutions that fit with their vision.
Actions
Users can mark actions as complete or save actions to access at a later time.
Leaves
Users earn different amounts of leaves from every action they complete. Each leaf represents the avoidance of 10 lbs of CO2 emissions.
Explore
Users can explore GetGreen to discover educational content about sustainability and actions that interest them across different categories.
Goals & Badges
Users can earn badges as they achieve goals within specific sustainability categories. Each badge awards a varying number of bonus leaves.
Improve retention without complete overhaul
Users often stop using GetGreen app, especially after the first week of use.
GetGreen wanted us to explore solutions to improve their user engagement and retention without requiring a complete app overhaul. They were also interested in how we may use AI to help address this issue.
Before our capstone, a significant amount of research had already been conducted for the GetGreen app by past design interns. We dedicated this phase of the project to familiarizing ourselves with the app and reviewing previous research. This helped us quickly identify the most urgent and feasible challenges to address, which allowed us to begin ideating design solutions with target users ahead of schedule.
Stakeholder Interviews
Auto-Ethnographic Diary Study
Literature Review
Co-Design Session
I worked with the team to conduct a 90min co-design sessions with 4 users. There were three main challenges that we identified from our research findings:
Presented actions are often not relevant to users.
Users are overwhelmed from a lack of clear direction and goal progress.
The search feature is underutilized and non-intuitive.
We invited four target users to collaborate and generate design ideas around these challenges. We explored their reasoning behind their choices and engaged in discussions about must-haves and priorities.
A balancing act of user needs with business goals
From our co-design workshop, we developed four strategies to guide our design concepts. At this point, we also concluded that AI didn’t need to be part of our solution and removed the search feature from our scope to focus on the two more urgent challenges.
Present actions and goals that are more relevant to users and avoid content that isn’t applicable to their real lives.
Visually show users their progress and sustainability impact to foster motivation and habit building.
Provide clear and guided organization for next steps to work on when users open the app.
Make learning content quick and easy to understand to avoid information overload.
The Challenge:
The team and I have to manage the limited development resources, tight deadline and the business goals while still staying true to addressing the user needs.
We only have one FE and one BE developer
GetGreen is aiming to release the features close to Earth Day
There are underlying pain points that users have emphasized which would need an overhaul of the app to fix; however, due it was not possible within the proposed timeline.
We created concepts of varying complexities and held an in-person review session with the CEO, CTO, developer, sales, and social media representatives at GetGreen to decide which of the concepts to focus on for our project.
Design Exploration on many levels
We explored varying ideas which we prototyped and presented to the GetGreen team. A few winning ideas were Daily Trivia to boost daily engagement and Plant A Tree Challenge to increase long term motivation of using the app. We then further iterated on the designs.
Daily Trivia
Our Daily Check-in concept was introduced to help guide users to quickly complete their actions right when they open the app. The feature was designed as a personalized set of cards for users to swipe through and then continue on with their day. However, compared to our other features, this one required more complexity and development work due to the need to manage different content types and user information.
Also, our sponsor suggested incorporating "trivia" instead of the fun facts we initially added, as they were already working questions with one of their university partners. To make our feature more feasible, we created a phased approach. We started with only Daily Trivia and envisioned its placement on the homepage where the Daily Check-in would go, which would allow our sponsor to implement it gradually.
Plant A Tree
Plant growth level system:
To enhance the excitement of growing a plant by earning leaves, we decided to personalize the experience with idea of creating your own garden.
Plant a Tree Challenge:
Acknowledging the importance of a more tangible and impactful reward, our sponsor suggested planting a real tree instead of a digital plant. In response, we introduced the Plant a Tree Challenge, allowing users to accumulate leaves over a month for a tree to be planted on their behalf.
Earn Leaves to Plant Trees:
We tested our “Plant a Tree” prototype with our co-design participants, and they loved the idea once they understood it. Initially, they believed they had to plant trees themselves. We iterated on titles and visuals to clarify that GetGreen would plant a tree for them, settling on "Earn Leaves to Plant Trees" for this challenge.
Visual Impact Statements
To help motivate users to earn more leaves, and to increase awareness of their impact (in leaf equivalencies to CO2 emissions), we introduced a set of weekly notifications that will track user’s leaves earned over time and celebrate their real-world impact with a visual metaphor.
Monthly Challenge
Apply real-world incentives to boost user engagement by having them complete a monthly challenge to earn rewards. Starting with the "Earn Leaves to Plant Trees" challenge, users can have a tree planted on their behalf.
Daily Trivia
Introduce a fun and quick way to learn about sustainability by testing your knowledge with an interactive daily question.
New Home Page
Create a more seamless and consistent UI that captures users attention and guides them on what they can do when they open the app.
Successful capstone showcase
Our team successfully presented our project at the HCDE Spring 2024 capstone with great feedback from the judges. Our sponsor also came and watched our presentation.
01 — Learning the resilience of balancing stakeholder & user needs, timeline and development limitations.
The major challenge was a pressing need for substantial enhancements to the content and functionality of the existing app. Yet, to ensure our design proposals were viable, we had to devise solutions that could be promptly integrated into the app’s current infrastructure. Balancing stakeholder needs, including users, and grappling with the app's limitations required our finesse and resilience.
02 — Don’t be afraid to hone in and push back on feedback
The breadth of the scope given to us sometimes diluted the depth of our exploration and testing, which could have been mitigated with a more concentrated approach. Throughout the process and team and I learnt to push back on certain feedback that led us down another new feature. Managing project scope is an important skill as a designer.
