So climate change…

Our beloved Earth is experiencing negative effects from us, humans. While everyone isn’t a major contributor to world degradation, we can start cleaning up the Earth right within our households. The idea of this app is to inform users and make creating a sustainable household easier. The goal of this design is to help the overall negative repercussions of pollution, overuse, and unsustainable practices that impact the environment every day.

How might we improve sustainability within households?

Understanding the lack of sustainable practices

To begin to understand the rationale behind this issue, my team and I conducted a survey and a couple of interviews. We really wanted to figure out if people were even interested in sustainability within their households, and if not, why not? We needed to know the thought process of potential stakeholders to be able to come up with effective solutions.

Do you care how sustainable your household is?

Do you know how to create a sustainable household?

By these surveys, people care about sustainability. The issue lies in the fact that much of society is naive when it comes to sustainable practices and don’t know how to be sustainable.

Considering our options

We were tasked to create a solution for an issue that we were passionate about. We weren’t restricted to just digital products so a few solutions we considered were:

1. We initially considered a website. We noted a website is universal, it could be accessed from any device with a browser. Additionally, since a website is generally accessed from a larger display such as computers, we thought it may provide more screen space for information.

2. Next, we considered a smart device, such as a thermostat or shower head that relays information to a central app about utility usage. Advantages of it included convenience for users as they do not need to input information as it directly relays to an app.

3. Finally, we considered a mobile app. The mobile app would provide in pocket access to information regarding sustainable practices.

After considering our potential solutions we decided to choose a mobile app approach. Since most people use smartphones nowadays, a mobile platform would provide quick and easy access for users. A website could be beneficial but that would require a user to log onto a browser. Additionally, a smart device is too costly and would only be effective if the user had multiple smart devices calculating their usage.

How can we use an app to promote household sustainability?

1. Inform

   Since many people lack the knowledge in creating a sustainable household, the first thing that we have to do is inform and teach our users how to be sustainable. We planned for our mobile app to include informative panels, displaying common sustainable practices within households and pushing daily tips.

2. Personalize

   This application is will also prompt the user for data about their household and where they zip. This data will create an experience catered to their region and household. An example of this is that a user lives in a dorm. Therefore, they don’t have access to their water bills. The app will suggest practices outside of water usage. This allows for an experience that is designed to ensure that there are no intangible suggestions.

3. Monitor Activity

   This application will also track and calculate how sustainable the user have been for a set period of time. For example, a user may use a certain amount of water in the month of November. This application will compare it to the state average tell the user to use a certain less amount of water. Along with that, it will calculate carbon emissions the user has produced based on electricity bills and habits around the household.

4. Visualization

   This application will also compile all the given data and display it as a curve, showing how much of each category the user has used over the span of months. Each category will be a different color and can be selected to display a graph. There will be an overall graph determined by carbon emissions of all the other categories combined to show how sustainable the user’s household is overall.

 Planning the user flow with a Sitemap

We weren’t sure how we wanted the user flow to be so created a sitemap to determine it.

 Low-Fidelity Wireframes

We began sketching our ideas onto paper (Procreate). We were targeting the four major functionalities that we had described above. Here are a few of the sketches.