Rooted

Inspiration

With Rooted, we wanted to create a site that provides an incentive to live more sustainably while being able to save money. The problem that comes with this is that many products that are advertised as sustainable alternatives tend to be more expensive, therefore less accessible for those who live on a budget (such as us college students!). Expensive, "green" alternatives such as fancy glass water bottles or high-end, chemical-free cleaners create a barrier between consumer-level environmental efforts and cleaner earth. We want Rooted to provide that accessibility by providing a platform for anyone to find cost-efficient and eco-friendly products that they can invest in. Thus, excessive product pollution can be minimized at a consumer level while simultaneously giving people a little more financial freedom in the consumer choices they make.

What it does

Rooted essentially provides a list of eco-friendly alternative products to everyday items such as supplies for bathrooms, homes, offices, etc. This list can be filtered down based on how much money you want or are able to spend and what you want to spend money on. Once you have that list, you can choose to save/store the products that interest you in a favorites page just by clicking the heart on each product card. The card itself consists of a product picture, price range, sustainability rating, and also a button for you to click if you actually bought this item. The profile page of the user will contain basic personal information and your "eco-score" (similar to a FICO score) which is determined by the number of products you buy as well as their sustainability rating. As you add more items with higher sustainability scores, the user is incentivized to practice sustainable habits and improve their eco-score and status.

How we built it

Our team chose to focus on the front-end development of this platform in order to create a cohesive product. We utilized HTML and CSS programming to create the pages and stylize them, drawing inspiration from a combination of tracking apps and shopping websites. We also created a sample database with products and their alternatives to implement in the HTML website in order to mimic a larger database that the website will eventually draw information from.

Challenges we ran into

Formatting and styling the pages of the website in the way we visioned our project was definitely a struggle and we did end up making a few compromises given the time constraint we had. Additionally, we ended up creating our own database since it was pretty hard to find a comprehensive database of products that included filters such as price or eco-friendliness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we came up with a cohesive idea and a website that provides a good picture of our vision. We were incredibly proud of our interactive components that make the user experiences more appealing and rewarding.

What we learned

We learned that although HTML is a fairly easy language to grasp, the smallest syntax error can definitely mess everything up. Additionally, it is challenging to collaborate between four people as syncing changes under a time constraint can quickly lead to unintended conflicts if not caught early.

What's next for Rooted

In terms of our idea, we were concerned about how we help users hold themselves accountable as opposed to just clicking the bought button to gain more points. So, we want to award users with coupons after they have bought a certain amount of sustainable products. Part of this idea will rely on the trust of users who were willing to sign up for this website for a good reason, to begin with. What we also want to do is create a community in which friends can track each other's progress or eco-score as well as see what products they have bought.