Team Members: Xibo Zhang, Sodiq Bello, Martha Haile
ABOUT THE PROJECT: RECYCLE 101
A healthy world is emerging in people's minds, global warming and greener energy are becoming popular, this project is aimed at helping, and showing people opportunities and benefits of participating in the trending environmental health.
Environmental problems are getting more and more people’s attention nowadays. A lot of people would like to do something to make it better, however, it’s hard to start without any knowledge and assistance.
Recycle101 is a website that provides all of the information to help bring people on board with recycling and help them get services nearby.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The Problem: People who would like to recycle have a hard time understanding different recycling categories and finding recycling services that cover all recycling categories in their community. They need a platform that can give them handy information about how to recycle and can show recycling services in their areas. How might we help them find recycling services they need and help them understand how to differentiate recycle categories, so they could have a smoother and easier recycling experience?
The Solution: Design a website that could help them find recycling services they need and help them understand how to differentiate recycle categories, so they could have a smoother and easier recycling experience.
USER RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
We spoke to over 20 users to see what their recycling needs and pain points are. We intended to achieve all of the following goals in our research.
Objective 1: We will like to know People's needs when it comes to recycling.
Objective 2: How Users can be encouraged to constantly recycle in their household and publicly.
Objective 3: How recycled materials can be categorized so users can easily learn how to recycle based on categories of their household material.
USER INTERVIEWS AND RESEARCH CONCLUSIONS.
We conducted extra user interviews with some users and we build user insights on the responses that the users gave. The User insight gave us a clear and organic idea as to how people relate to and perceive the idea of Recycling. This insight enables us to direct our User experience satisfaction.
User Interviews
Affinity Diagram
User Insight
More ideation and brainstorm
The team, in the ideation phase, evaluated the user insight and created an affinity diagram, which is a form of ideation where common insights from each user interview are grouped and this allowed us to weigh the best common experience in users that's we interviewed.
USER PERSONA
Project proto persona: This is a brief design of what a typical user is going to look and sound like, though this use is not a physical or mental representation of all the users, it stands as a general overview of our users based on certain deduction from the research. The user persona for this project is Helen and she has the following demographics.
STORYBOARD
The storyboard represents a told story of a typical journey experienced by a potential user of the Recycle 101 website and mobile app.
DESIGN
COMPETITORS ANALYSIS: At the design stage, our team did more research to understand how a recycled website should look and how it has been used in the past, we research prospective competitors and evaluated based on heuristics, user engagement, user comments, and user rating of our competitor's websites.
USER FLOW
During the design process of this project we performed some testing, this testing was designed based on the user journey through the experience of users when they perform certain tasks. Our team performed the following user testing based on the following user flow.
SKETCHES AND LO-FI WIREFRAMES
Based on our user flow, we created the first draft of our wireframes. We built a homepage, which includes access to all of the main functions, and we also included a real people recycling story section on the bottom of the page, which we were inspired by one of our competitor’s websites, and we think this feature will make more people interested in recycling. We also created a recycle categories page, where you can find Infos on the 8 most common recycle categories; As well as a recycle service page, where you can find recycling services near you, and a login and profile page.
STYLE GUILD
This style guild will be the styling guideline and standard of this design. we carefully selected this style guild so that we can have a heuristic consistency in the color scheme, page layout, font styling, and other design-based ideas
TESTING PLAN AND TESTING
User Testing Takeaways:
Overall, the test gave us a lot of valuable feedback: A couple of them got confused by the wording we used for the main features. For example, instead of “recycle service” we used “who can help me?”, and that confused some of our users. And people would almost always go to the navigation first to find the feature they are looking for, and we didn’t have very clear and detailed navigation at that time. We also got feedback that having a search bar on the home page could make finding information very easy as well. So based on the user testing takeaways, we started our iteration and height-fi design.
DESIGN ITERATIONS
We created better and more functional navigation, and make sure to have a search bar available anywhere that’s needed. We also changed the way we name the features to make them more clear to the users.
FINAL DESIGN AND FRONT-END DEVELOPMENT
FED TESTING AND ITERATION
Our team coded and tested this design in a front-end design process. This also leads to more testing and iteration in the coding. For example one of the users 'Andrew' pointed out some of the heuristic discrepancies in the design and the development, like the margins and the google map Api which were later fixed and developed better at the stage o this design.
FUTURE CHANGES FOR DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
Create a color cluster of geolocation in the maps in such a way you can find all the services near you.
A profile that can track achievements, over a long period usually years.
Allow creation of income from our website for recycling enthusiasts, recycling services, and people that find the need to make money at all as a side gig just recycling.
More User Testing.
CONCLUSION
Recycle 101 was conceptualized as a website that will help users understand and undergo the process of recycling their household recycle-able materials. The completion of this stage gave us a clear understanding of our users and user needs to make recycling a success. This project was also designed to achieve a global goal of less plastic or any kind of pollution. We employ the use of data updates and user gratification to encourage users through lifetime engagement with this platform.
