Second Thought

Do you consider yourself an online shopaholic? Download our Chrome Extension, "Second Thought", where a pop-up at checkout will come up that will get you to double think about consumerism (and laugh).

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The Thought Process for "Second Thought"

Inspiration

When prompted with the sustainability challenge, our team brainstormed how we personally act unsustainably. We knew that our website would aim to provide useful information about how to act more environmentally-friendly, but we struggled on how to make this realistic. Why would someone randomly go to a website about not-so-fun facts? In order to make this project effective, we needed it to interact with a person's everyday life. When looking at our own lives, we realized what college kids depended on: Amazon.

How it works

To counter our Amazon over-consumerism, we decided to create a Google Chrome extension that would prompt the user at checkout with a pop-up. This pop-up would force the buyer to double-think about how their purchase would effect the environment. However, what college kid would want to see this? That's why we made sure to put funny animal pictures with our pop-up! Along with the animal picture is a fact about how consumerism is harming the planet. This fact is aimed at a specific category based on the items in your cart. The images are randomized to guarantee a smile with every pop-up!

How we built it

This extension was designed on Figma. The extension was built using Chrome developer tools and documentation, using a content script to inject a fixed HTML document on specific pages, like the checkout page for Amazon. Other than that, it was done using plain HTML and CSS, mostly formatted in the content.js script.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we faced was how to create an extension, considering most of experience is in creating just static websites. Once learning how to do this, we needed to figure out how to categorized the customer's products so we could provide them with a relevant fact. To counter this we decided to use chat GPT to give it categories to chose from with an item description. It then uses the description to categorize it, and select the right fact. However, we did not have enough time to implement this feature into our code, but hope to do so in the future!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to have a product that promotes sustainability that could actually be useful to someone's everyday life. We're also happy to accomplish this while giving people a smile.

What we learned

We learned how to create chrome extensions. We also learned about the terrible effects of over-consumerism and how we are contributing to it constantly.

What's next for Second Thought

Going into the future, we would like to apply Second Thought to other websites, mostly fast fashion (Shein, Forever21, etc). These places are where we found over-consumerism to be the most prevalent. We would also like the add a counter that tracks how much money that person has spent on that website, to really make them think about their purchase.

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