Green

Inspiration

When we hear Go Green, most people know what that entails: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Turn Off the Lights, Carpool, etc.

So why haven’t people started to live more sustainably?

In order to protect our planet, everyone has to do their part to reduce their carbon footprint, but currently, people don’t know how their behaviors lead to impact, and thus, have no incentive to take action. After all, one more plastic bottle couldn’t really hurt, could it?

What it does

Green is a habit tracker that helps you become more sustainable by holding you accountable for your sustainability tasks each day. By showing you how repeated action becomes real sustainable impact, Green transforms short-term goals into life-long habits. In the app, users can learn about ways to help the Earth, select sustainability goals, and keep track of their total reduced emissions. They can also pick up badges for reaching certain milestones. To help people get to their goals, Green checks in on users throughout the week to remind them of their daily tasks, and update them on their progress.

How we built it

We used Figma to design the user experience and create UX flows and prototypes. For the front end, we used React Native and Redux. After discussing and sketching out our ideas, we worked on building out the design and app infrastructure simultaneously, making sure to communicate design changes along the way. Once both parts were complete, we integrated the UX flow and design elements from Figma into React Native and managed the data flow in memory throughout the application using Redux.

Challenges we ran into

As a smaller team, there was definitely a lot of pressure to get started building earlier, but we ran into problems at the beginning with landing on a product that people could truly benefit from. In building Green, we had planned to add push notifications which turned out to be more difficult than expected, but definitely a goal for the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With a small dev team, converting the Figma prototypes into code was challenging at times, but we ended up with a user experience that we’re really proud of. In addition, we love that Green is for everyone, no matter what knowledge level or age, and can only do more good for the environment as more people join!

What's next for Green

We believe Green can grow in all three branches of the product. There is room to expand into multiple types of content outside of tasks, and we have some ideas on other ways to incentivize action with things like points and rankings. On top of that, we'd love to introduce a social element to the platform, where people compare and share results with others!