WeCycle: Gamification of Positive Habits
August 2018 – December 2018
Problem Statement
Although many individuals these days are aware of the benefits of recycling, they lack motivation and knowledge to do so, and fail to recognize the collective impact that individuals can have on the environment. This project seeks to tackle this problem by increasing motivation and supplementing knowledge by gamifying recycling with a mobile app. Real life problems this project tackles include the following:
Encouraging users to improve their recycling habits over time
Having a lasting impact on user attitudes towards recycling
Improving users’ feelings of connectedness with like-minded individuals
Helping users contextualize their impact with meaningful visualizations
Providing users with accessible knowledge on what is recyclable.
Concept
Each of our five team members first brainstormed potential project ideations independently, and then we all came together to decide on one idea to move forward with as a group. The selected topic centers around recycling behaviors and motivators. We were mainly interested in what motivates individuals to recycle, what prevents them from recycling, and what would help them recycle more.
Contextual Interviews and Data Analysis
Our target interview audience includes individuals who are aware about recycling but also self-identify as unmotivated recyclers. This target audience has two main traits that we believe are very important in achieving our goal.
First, these individuals must be aware about recycling. It would be difficult to gather attitudes towards recycling when participants lack awareness and knowledge on it. Second, these individuals must self-identify as unmotivated recyclers. Because we want to gather knowledge on what motivates and prevents individuals from recycling, we thought it best to target unmotivated recyclers in particular, because they would be able to gather more information on motivating roadblocks towards recycling.
We used a uniform interview procedure for all participants: the interviewer followed a pre-made script and list of questions while the notetaker took notes on a laptop. Each interview took place at the participant’s home, and they were 20-30 minutes in length. We identified six clusters from our activity notes from these interviews: identity, knowledge and awareness, challenges, motivation, opinions on society, and habits. We further concluded that identity, as well as knowledge and awareness, contribute towards personal challenges, motivations, and opinions on society. Together, these three latter categories impact personal habits.
Affinity diagram findings
We identified six clusters from our activity notes from these interviews: identity, knowledge and awareness, challenges, motivation, opinions on society, and habits. We further concluded that identity, as well as knowledge and awareness, contribute towards personal challenges, motivations, and opinions on society. Together, these three latter categories impact personal habits.
Ideation
We first conducted research on our solution space to avoid pursuing a project that already exists. We found that the solution space lacked some kind of mobile app experience that ties together separate concepts we’ve seen in a more comprehensive way – there are apps that are tracking-based, and apps that are educational, but there are not really any apps that fulfill all of these different aspects of user’s needs in one place. After independently ideating in this novel solution space, we regrouped and agreed to pursue one specific solution: a mobile app as described above. In conceptualizing the design of this app, we decided that it should accommodate a set of five tasks.
Preliminary sketches
We made several app sketches based on our tasks.
Users should be able to track what and how much they are recycling and throwing away as trash.
Users should be able to see summaries over time of how much they recycled, and these summaries should be supported with meaningful visualizations.
Users should be able to adapt and learn through frequent tips and reminders from the app.
Users should be able to compete with other users (friends, families, or strangers) on leaderboards.
Users should be able to see community updates and like or comment on such updates.
Storyboards
We created storyboards to speculate on how the app would function in the daily lives of people in our target audience. We imagined that WeCycle would fit seamlessly into, as well as complement, their frequent behaviors around recyclable and non-recyclable waste they produce.
Paper Prototyping
We created a paper prototype and asked five users of our target audience to participate in usability tests. Feedback identified several problems, such as vagueness around our “points” system, difficulty in filtering the leaderboard, and lack of instruction on the camera page.
Final Designs: Mid and High Fidelity Prototypes
We used the insights from the usability testing feedback to inform the creation of our mid fidelity Balsamiq wireframes, allowing us to concretely spec out spacing, alignments, icon placement, and interaction flow. We used the Balsamiq wireframes to perform heuristic evaluations based on Nielsen’s 10 heuristics for user interface design.
Here are two selected screens from our design, shown at the mid and high fidelity stages:
