veganday

Inspiration/Background

One of the single largest effects that we have on the environment is through our choices in food consumption. Of all forms of food, animal products (especially beef) tend to be the worst—taking up almost 60% of all greenhouse gas emissions from food production. The scientific community is generally united in the concept that eating a vegan diet emits less greenhouse gas. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. But knowing the facts and feeling empowered and motivated to make a lifestyle change, are two very different things.

A meat eater who is considering ‘going vegan’ will often experience dissonance with the idea of going vegan. This person is usually environmentally conscious and good-willed, but the fundamental barriers to going vegan, being a trial of self-sustaining motivation, an action against the status quo, a lack of perception of impact, and the stringent definition of either being a vegan or a carnivore all work together to fizzle out even the best efforts of someone who started off highly motivated.

Instead of relying on pure determination to make smarter food choices for the environment, we wanted to create a framework to make a long-term solution to how people approach ‘being vegan.’ Inspired by the effects of dining halls implementing meat-free foods on particular days or ‘Meatless Mondays,’ we wanted to create a friendly framework to make being vegan easier. On a small scale, the offsets of an individual might seem insubstantial, but over a larger population and over time, subtle changes in behavior can prove to be powerful. Being vegan for a day-week-month is better than not trying at all.

Our solution and what it does

Our solution, veganday, is a self-improvement platform structured to enable users to make positive commitments to being vegan. Through the usage of data visualization, carbon-footprint data, and a gamified incentive system, veganday acts to keep users on track with their goals of eating a plant-based diet. We hope to make being vegan-friendly—not everyone can just drop animal products from their diet, and that should be okay. Making smart choices for the environment is a process and feeling good about making those choices is the start of that journey.

Considerations and Constraints

For a project that calls for a radical change in lifestyle, we wanted to approach finding our solution in a non-judgemental and friendly way—no meat-shaming!

We have strongly considered our audience—the environmentally curious person. We define this person to be someone who wants to have a positive impact on the environment but doesn’t necessarily know how to. They might have trouble seeing how their actions impact the environment directly but are well-intentioned.

Given the short timeframe, we weren’t able to get to all aspects of functionality, though it challenged us to think more critically and under more stressful circumstances.

How we built it

We prototyped this product using Figma, with illustrations done in Procreate.

Challenges we ran into

Early on, it was difficult defining the range of control that we wanted the user to have. We considered making goals for non-food and non-vegan-related goals, but with too many goals the app’s purpose became diluted. Through multiple iterations, we took away many of the redundant functions and features, consolidated our home dashboard, and made decisions to focus on what the product specializes in. Our design focused on tightening the functions and purpose, to better cater to a specific audience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our consistent and streamlined process in developing our solution. From ideation to high fidelity mockups, we stayed very methodological in each step, creating physical pin-ups, moodboards, and conducting relevant research. Retrospectively, it was inspiring to see ourselves stay disciplined in trusting our process and not cutting corners even with a tighter deadline.

What we learned

We expanded into different skills, using illustration and user research to our target audience to learn about what is successful in our app. On Figma, we learned how to use more advanced wireframing, and build up iteratively. In terms of concept, we learned the importance of establishing a key target audience/demographic in the ideation stage. Focusing on this step helped simplify and distill all aspects of our direction, informing our visual design, functionality, and purpose.

What's next for veganday

We would like to further extend the community aspect of veganday, where friends can challenge and hold each other accountable through setting a joint goal, or get notifications when the other checks in for a meal that day. This could be made compatible with the Apple or other smartwatches in a similar manner to ‘closing your rings,’ and sharing of activity with friends.

In a topic as vast as climate change, there are many causes and ways to offset our carbon footprint. In our solution, we narrowed it down to eating plant-based foods, to come from one specific approach. For future expansion, it would be interesting to see how this method and concept carries over to little habits like turning off the lights before leaving for work, or the different modes of transportation you take every day. We hope this type of platform can be the host for future potential.

Built With

• figma