Sharon Dayoung Lee – Carboncash

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Carboncash

Carboncash is a mobile shopping assistant that familiarizes consumers with sustainable purchase options.

My role

Value proposition, flow iterations, visual design, and interaction design

Team

Judy Chun, Elena Deng, and Antonio Song

Duration

10 weeks

Problem space

Consumers struggle to practice sustainable lifestyle despite its social and environmental significance.

“65% said they want to buy purpose-driven brands that advocate sustainability, yet only about 26% actually do so.”

Harvard Business Review

©Global Climate Strike

©Amnesty International

Approach

What are the current obstacles that hinder consumers from going green?

To start off our research, we conducted a preliminary 1:1 user interviews with both groups of individuals from the CMU campus community who identify themselves as regular consumers and green consumers. Through the process, we identified a significant difference in the journey of regular vs. green consumers. From the journey map, we highlighted three key pain points that hinder regular consumers from going green.

Discovery

Users struggled from high price and were feeling vulnerable about not being able to gratify the immediate result of their actions.

Based on the interview findings, we identified the users struggled to make the shift towards a green lifestyle due to high price of items, lack of local green initiatives, and a sense of vulnerability that comes from not being able to see immediate results of their actions.

Explorations

We set off to create a mobile shopping assistant with four core features.

After exploring a range of ideas through creating wireframes and user journeys we decided to create a mobile shopping app. Our team felt that a mobile app would be a low-barrier, all-in-one medium that would allow consumers to start out their sustainable lifestyle in an informative and effortless way.

Iterations

The small scale changes lead to noticeable changes to the whole interface.

Below is an example of how the element-level changes standardized the interface all together. Through the process, the design system team created new components (such as dropdown component) and reestablished elevation grayscale, color system for buttons, and paddings.

Final outcome

As a result of the project, we delivered a Carboncash mobile app. By combining the core shopping experience with rewards and community motivation we aimed to incentivize consumers to engage with Carboncash across multiple touch points. The reward and shopping experience would act as the centerpiece of the app, and the motivation through community transaction/map program would provide the consumers with incentives to continue pursuing a green habit.

01

Review your weekly and monthly performance

Keep track of your overall CC score, which reflects your green purchase habits, and CC points that can be used towards your future purchases.

02

Real-time product information with AR scan

Scan barcode of the products to view environmental information real-time.

03

See the impact you bring to your community

Feel motivated to keep up your green habits by engaging with the people in your community.

04

View points gained from your purchases

The shopping cart gives an overview of the points earned through the purchase.

Impact

Our app received positive feedback from the user groups made of both regular consumers and green consumers. For future iterations, we want to gauge the impact of financial incentives and environmental separately through an A/B Testing and see which performs as a better motivation factor. Collaborating with a team of designers and researchers I learned the value of aligning the team's goal early on in the process to make better use of allotted time.

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