EcoTrace

Project Relation to Design Prompt

The design prompt encourages us to identify a human challenge and come up with a long term solution for it. The challenge we decided to focus on was the decrease in environmental education and knowledge. So we created an app that allows consumers to be mindful of what products they are buying and whether it's sustainable just by searching it up or scanning it. This will be impactful for the future because we are working towards creating a sustainable earth in the future.

Description of Design Decisions

We decided to go for a bright green design with a hint of blue. The choice in color allows the user to feel connected to nature and feel inspired to change their habits so that they can keep the planet healthy and happy. We also made sure our icons were rounded, because it’s aesthetically pleasing and catches the users eye. We made sure the app was user friendly so anyone could easily use it. We also desire to give the user options and include a dark page. As you can see we had the user in mind when designing our app.

Inspiration

With AI and recent world developments becoming our new future, the thought of having common non-sustainability practices should be prevented from consumers. We thought about how an app might be helpful to the general public to make them more aware of the sustainable and unsustainable products around them.

What it does

Helps consumers be more conscious of their buying needs by providing an app where users are able to get fast information about company's sustainability habits. The app has a history of past searched/scanned items which the user can choose to have that data stored to show them the amount of progress they did towards their sustainability goal. Once scanned/searched the user will be taken to a page with a letter grade of how sustainable the product is and a brief description about how the product (or company) is or is not sustainable.

How we built it

We built a working prototype of EcoTrace using Figma. The prototype includes the general layout design along with how the app is intended to be used.

Prototype link

Design link

Challenges we ran into

We faced a couple challenges with Figma as the group has never used it before. The first couple hours were used figuring out and getting used to the tools.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Created a functioning app after an initial failed attempt.
Encouraged a Environmental centered mindset
Practiced teamwork
Improvement of Figma skills and knowledge

What we learned

Going back to the drawing board does not indicate failure
It’s important to actively communicate with your teammates so that you can all be on the same page.
There’s never a bad idea, but ideas can always be built upon.
Receiving feed back it amazing!