Second Life

Capstone Project | Springboard UI/UX Bootcamp

Problem

Personal waste is confusing to manage. Resources are not always readily available across the country to ensure individuals know exactly how to dispose of certain items. Most importantly, the impact of personal waste on the climate is not common knowledge, and information regarding the climate crisis is often overwhelming.

Solution

Create a tool to provide resources about how to dispose of common household items and introductory information about the climate crisis.

Project Details

Students pursuing the UI/UX career track will complete an independent capstone project in which they follow the process of creating a tool from ideation to prototypes.

Roles & Scope

Since the context of this project was the Springboard UI/UX boot camp, I took on the research and design roles. I conducted primary and secondary research, user interviews, and developed a prototype from my own sketches.

Project Overview

Climate education and routine building.
After a round of user interviews, waste management challenges were presented in many neighborhoods. This motivated me to develop a tool that would provide climate education and create a sense of routine in the context of household waste.

Research

This project required various rounds of research. Before honing in on the final concept, I did primary research on the problem statement. This led me to conduct user interviews to understand my audience. Understanding pain points and frustrations allowed me to create a clear picture of the tool I wanted to design to solve the users’ potential problems.

Landfills

Only 32% of the waste from the United States is recycled or composted. 50% ends up in landfills

(United States Environmental Protection Agency)

Users & Audience

After sending out a screener survey, I chose 5 participants to conduct user interviews. I had originally constrained my users to be Massachusetts residents as I knew my tool needed to be geographically specific. After my first 3 interviews, I realized I wanted to gather some data about the waste management systems elsewhere, so I chose to interview someone who lived in Canada as they have a very efficient waste management system.

Lack of knowledge

“I don’t even know when the trash is picked up - from there on, I have no clue where it goes.”

Affinity Mapping

I took snippets of quotes from the interviews into the following categories: Process + Steps, Pain Points, Sustainability Knowledge, Emotions, Motives, and Comparison to Other Systems. This helped me understand the pain points of my potential users and prioritize what problems I can attempt to solve with my tool.

Capstone 1 Persona_1

Capstone 1 Persona_2

Capstone 1 Persona_1

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User Personas

These personas helped guide my decisions while designing the app. It helped me empathize with the potential user and predict what kinds of tools and interactions would be helpful to them. The main pain points to focus on were having climate information accessible to users and creating a sense of routine for users.

Possible Solutions

Interactive

Educational Modules

Educational modules for people to use at schools and any workplace. These modules could be interactive and include activities to practice at home to create waste routines.

Forum/Discussion Platform

An open forum for residents to express their frustrations and concerns to the appropriate local authorities about waste management. Similar to a social media platform, users can write their posts, react and comment on each others’ posts, and a feature I would add is to be able to tag a category of the issue (eg hygiene, lack of resources, confusion, etc.)

Tracking App

with Resources

An app that would have an integrated tracking function for users to visualize their waste. The gamified format of the app will hopefully incentivize users to recycle and reuse their items before directly throwing them away. This would also include resources about the climate crisis and its impacts on our daily lives.

After a brief exploration of each idea, I chose to create an app that hosted resources about how to dispose of common household items and introductory information about the climate crisis so that the information can be easily accessible to a wide audience without adding too much time to their daily routine.

This was a first draft of what I imagined the app's user flow could look like.

Sketches

Directory Sketch

This page was the main focus of my process. It shows the directory of items a user can learn how to dispose of.

Second Life Sign Up Screen

This sketch shows the sign up process.

Intro Screen Sketches

These two sketches are the first screens a user would see.

Directory Sketch

This page was the main focus of my process. It shows the directory of items a user can learn how to dispose of.

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These are the first drafts of the app that I envisioned for the tool. In the early stages of design, I was making decisions that may have been better suited for a desktop rather than a phone such as a horizontal scroll and information that populates with additional interaction.

Lo-fi Wireframes

The focus of my work was the directory flow for users to browse and search for items. During my research, I surveyed other recycling apps and noticed that some included an onboarding process. That was an important aspect to include in Second Life's user flow to ensure users understand its values and features to take full advantage of what it can offer.

Mood Board

To guide my design style, I created a mood board with inspiration for my visual imagery, photography, and colors. I also included some UI inspiration with interactions that I wanted to integrate into my screens.

Testing

The fun part… testing! After creating a prototype, I was able to test my product in the real world. I gathered a group of 5 friends and family members to conduct usability testing. I wanted to get insight on the following:

Overall impression of the visual design style (what feelings are evoked when using the tool)
Which area of the tool is most valued by users (Directory, Resources, History)
Uncover usability problems in the Directory red route

After testing 5 participants, I made edits and did another round of tests with 5 different participants.

Outcomes and Results

The final version of the Second Life prototype included:

a directory that allows users to search or browse items that they would like to dispose of
a resource hub with climate vocabulary, links to quick articles about the climate crisis, and ways to get involved in climate action
an item tracker for users to monitor their waste and adjust habits
customizable preferences and feedback opportunities