Envaluate

March 2020 - June 2020
Partially Shipped, Work-In-Progress

Interaction Design UX/UI Information Architecture

INTRO

Carbon emissions causing detrimental climate change effects are only increasing every year. Envaluate helps track people's personalized carbon footprints by linking to bank accounts and tracking spending.

As an intern, my job was working alongside a designer to test and evaluate designs and provide feedback to streamline user and business needs.

OVERVIEW

With more data comes greater design challenge

In current spending tracking apps, users know what category they are spending in and how much money they spend but they don't know:

In this project, we are building a future in which users can know all those information.

Data Model

Our project takes people's spending habits and models their carbon footprint


Envaluate had already built an algorithm which translates people's purchases into kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted and categorizes their purchases by category.

Now that the ground work has been done by engineers, here are the design challenges:


QUICK, ITERATIVE PROCESS

Through an interactive design process, I was quickly moving between paper and digital prototyping, testing prototypes with users, and co-creating with and getting feedback from the lead designer and engineers. From each iteration, I learned something valuable. Some helped me make small usability improvements, some helped me make major changes in my design direction.


Initial iterations focused on data display

My initial prototypes were focused on a flexible data display so that users can manage their emission data in different views: transaction-based, monthly, and attached to rewards. With research, I experimented with all different ways of organizing the data, and how we could optimize each type.

Initial exploration

LEARNING FROM USERS

Users only had a baseline understanding of climate issues

From initial testing, I learned that while users are environmentally conscious, they were not aware about the complexities of footprint tracking and did not know that different cateogories of purchases (eg. food, travel) contribute to a different amount of kilograms of carbon.

Users don't know much about emissions

Users need external motivating factors to continue to use the app.

Users, while they did care about the climate, did not seem enthusiastic about returning to the app unless they were personally gaining something from it. Beyond just a basic data breakdown, they did not understand why they should use the app and wanted to see more interactive features.

Users need motivation

This means:

DESIGN DECISIONS

This project is still ongoing so final designs with decisions made will be coming soon!