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