EcoLife

A fun way to hold yourself accountable to save the environment, step by step!

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was looking at how other apps could drive users to achieve short-term and long-term goals. In this case, we mirrored the strategy of Khan Academy and Flora. Both used fun icons and levels to help users achieve productivity in a certain area of their life. We applied this to the environment because sticking with the goals we make to save our planet is crucial towards the future well-being of the generations to come.

What it does

EcoLife currently does EcoChecks where every day, the user checks off a series of eco-friendly tasks they have done from a uniform list. Each task is worth a certain amount of points based on difficulty. The user then receives their point count from the day and whether or not they met the daily requirement.

How we built it

The two parts of how we built EcoLife were coming up with the idea and building the idea. When we were coming up with the idea, we first started off by identifying a problem. We ended up seeing two flaws with the eco-friendly movement, which were the tendency to tell someone what to do to become eco-friendly, but not actually guiding them in that journey and also the view of being eco-friendly as something boring or tedious than fun and engaging. To address this, we fused the ideas rooted in Khan Academy along with the environmentally-friendly movement. We ended up with EcoLife, a way to track a user's progress in becoming more eco-friendly through suggestions and encouragement, while using interactive and game-like features to make the process feel more like a fun journey of self-growth. We considered the idea of making a Chrome extension but ultimately decided against it because it is a client side service. Our team also wanted to have daily reminders to do certain eco-friendly tasks, but felt that could pose too much of a bother to the user. We ended up deciding to do a plugin that the user could check into and report their progress there as well as receive feedback. As for building the actual product, our objective was to have an MVP (minimum viable product). We divided the code into the UI (user interface), reminders, and setup. We decided to create an add-on for server side usage and accessibility. We used Google card service to build the UI for EcoLife and turned the reminders part into a background application.

Challenges we ran into

One significant challenge we encountered was with communication. On the first day of the hackathon, we had trouble with team communication and getting started. This set us back by a lot because we lost an entire day that could've been spent towards productively getting the ball rolling on our idea. However, we recognized this flaw and began pinging each other to facilitate more active engagement with our fellow team members. We also had a couple of technical challenges with certain code errors, but were able to resolve those issues with thorough troubleshooting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of being able to achieve a prototype with such short time. We are also very happy to have collaboratively developed an idea that is both unique and impactful. EcoLife is special because it's an enjoyable way for people of all ages and backgrounds to further their journey towards an eco-friendly lifestyle! We are also proud of our improvement in communication and our individual team members' ability to cohesively work together and form a final product!

What we learned

Our team learned about how important it is to consider the user when developing a product. Many features of our app were specially designed with the user's accessibility and comfort in mind. We also learned and improved when it came to smooth team communication. Though we had a rocky start, we learned to always keep the user at the center of your innovation and to prioritize communication amongst team members.

What's next for EcoLife

There's so much waiting ahead for EcoLife! Though we wish we could do everything, our team members understood that there were practical limitations to what we could accomplish in 2 days. However, there are still so many features we would love for EcoLife to have in order to make it a more community-based, interactive, and engaging way of supporting the environment. Here are the features that we have planned to further EcoLife:

  • Weekly/monthly summaries for the number of points earned
  • ML algorithm that shows you which tasks were most common throughout the week/month
  • Using ML to have your least common tasks pop as suggestions of new things you can try
  • Settings tab to change themes, notification frequency, etc.
  • Harder and harder tasks added on as you level up
  • Adding more tasks (user suggested tasks)
  • Partner with eco-friendly companies for discounts on their products as users level up
  • Adopt blockchain as backend storage, as it is more secure We want EcoLife to serve as an efficient and effective tool for the user and for the planet!

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