Inspiration
The United Nations Environment Program reports that 19-23 million tons of plastic waste pollutes aquatic ecosystems every year, but plastic is so convenient and readily available that it's hard to let it go. Even something as simple as forgetting your lunch can cause an overuse of plastic in restaurant food containers. To combat this problem, we present Terra, a habit forming app that helps people reduce their plastic waste by finding alternatives and building sustainable practices.
About Terra
Terra provides plastic reduction options in the form of challenges. These are short, timeboxed goals (such as using a refillable water bottle for 1 day) that build up over time to have a big impact. They are designed to fit into daily life and there is an option to start a challenge streak so that users can build sustainable habits incrementally.
How We Built It
Research
We began with desk research: A brief literature review (see references below), a competitive analysis of similar apps, and a SWOT analysis. We found that gamification can help users accomplish goals that otherwise seem too daunting and within the sustainability app market, there is a lot of focus on completing and tracking tasks, but not on maintaining sustainability habits over time. Then we completed a user interview and found that while the participant valued sustainability and wanted to decrease their plastic use, they valued convenience more. Terra is unique in that it applies incremental, habit building techniques to the sustainability space that have previously been successful in apps like Duo Lingo. By focusing on smaller, more manageable goals while still making their full impact apparent to users, Terra helps bridge the gap between being inspired to do something and having the discipline to accomplish it. Furthermore, there is a lot of impact information that is confusing to anyone outside of the environmental science domain, showing their amount of waste or savings in kg, kwh, or metric tons. Terra explains impact in a way that everyday users can understand so that they feel their accomplishments.
Design
In accordance with our sustainability theme, we chose a deep earth color palette and designed a logo that showed plants growing out of a plastic bottle to represent the change from plastic to environmental growth. For our prototype, we chose to design the process of selecting a challenge, completing it, and seeing the results as this highlights the main function of Terra. Upon successfully completing the challenge, the user is prompted to start a streak to complete the same challenge at a regular frequency.
Challenges We Ran Into
The biggest challenge for us was time. Finishing user research in a 24 hour timeframe required some heavy trade-offs because we didn't have enough time to find participants that matched critical eligibility criteria and schedule a time with them. To make it work, we reached out to a friend who we knew had purchased some reusable products before with the intention of reducing plastic use and didn't mind hopping in a quick, last minute meeting. We also added a large layer of desk research to supplement. This left us with a shorter amount of time to prototype and we had to work together in a more agile way to get the project done in time, so we split our roles and one team member completed the remaining research while the other team member did some quick, preliminary designs with the information we already had.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
We are proud of our design concept. The habit forming techniques that have worked in other domains have yet to be applied to sustainability and we are excited about the impact that an app like Terra could have. We have also never completed a project in a 24 hour timeframe before today and are grateful to each other for cooperating towards our goal when we met challenges.
What We Learned
From this project, we learned to always try to include users in research, even under tight deadlines. Any amount of user data is better than none, so next time we will start with asking users to participate to make the most of our time and split up tasks between us from the beginning to get more done.
What's Next For Terra
Other ideas that we implied in our design but haven't built out yet include a leaderboard and external resources. In our literature review, we found that as long as users have some kind of awareness that a problem exists, social interactions and virtual objects help motivate them to move from being inspired to accomplishing a goal that helps solve the problem. Terra provides external resources to add more context to our users' awareness while the leader board and some resulting reward badges or trophies can help motivate them to take action.
References
Bastian Kordyaka, Samuli Laato, Sebastian Weber, Juho Hamari, and Bjoern Niehaves. 2024. Exploring the association between engagement with location-based game features and getting inspired about environmental issues and nature. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 755, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642786
Ifeoma Adaji, Peter Idoko, and Mikhail Ola Adisa. 2024. Insights from the Review of Apps that Influence Environmental Sustainability. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP Adjunct '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 154–159. https://doi.org/10.1145/3631700.3664878
All of the photography used in our project came from https://www.pexels.com/. See the artists below:
Built With
- figma
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