How UX design can impact climate change
The average electronic device in the US has a life span of 5 years. According to the Electronics Takeback Coalition, only 19% of all that electronic waste is recycled. ( http://www.electronicstakeback.c... ) The rest is simply trashed. That is the equivalent of every American household walking out to their back yard with a shovel and burying three electronic devices every year.
Electronic waste is a rapidly growing stream of consumer waste because most people do not know how to properly dispose of their old electronic devices. Electronic scrap contain harmful components such as lead, beryllium, and cadmium, can have severe human impact through exposure. Along with organ damage and neurological damage, e-waste pollutes our air, water, and soil. Only 12.5% of electronic waste is properly recycled, and over 140 million cellphones are thrown in the landfill every year in U.S. alone. In this project, we search to find a way to help raise awareness of electronic recycling and the adverse effects of e-waste.
SOLUTION: A web-based platform to connect users with local e-waste dropoff locations
To combat growing waste, I decided to design with a platform, Ecodrop, to educate people about e-cycling and using their location to encourage electronic donation to reduce waste by finding nearby drop-off locations. In order to raise awareness, a link to Ecodrop will be posted on laptops and cellphones so that people can easily recycle their devices when they need. Below, I’ve outlined my design process on how I came to this solution.
Secondary research
Research the current market: I began researching current e-waste causes and solutions to gain a better insight about the challenges, opportunities, and resources that are already available to the public. In fact, there are several resources that guide users about electronic waste management, but none are effectively marketed and lack a geo-based filter. Although there are available resources for how to dispose your electronics, people are still relatively unaware or simply do not have the time to recycle their electronics. Additional challenges arose: How can we increase awareness of available e-cycling resources? How can we incentivize electronic recycling?
Primary research
Conduct user surveys and focus groups: My assumption was that people do not know where to properly dispose of their devices once they are ready to discard them. To test this hypothesis, I asked focus groups (all college students of different backgrounds and majors, ages 18–22) the following questions:
- How often do you upgrade or purchase new technology?
- What do you do with your technology once you are ready to discard it?
- What are your incentives to recycle? If you do not recycle, what would incentivize you to do so?
- What are your hesitations and hurdles when it comes to recycling or discarding old devices and electronics?
Analysis & key insights
Common pain points
“I don’t know where or how to throw away my old device”
- Users update their technology often
- Users do not know how to properly dispose their device
- Most users hoard their devices and leave them in storage or give them away to family
- Users do not know the “rules” regarding recycling electronic waste, and whether their old devices would qualify
“I am scared that the information on my device will be stolen”
- Users are concerned on data security and privacy
- Users do not know how to restore phone settings and remove their data from phone before disposing
“I like to recycle because it makes me feel good but I don’t know how”
- Young users are self-motivated and incentivized to recycle because they want to do greater good for the planet
- Users would recycle, even it was inconvenient, if they knew how
- Money is not a huge incentive, but if given the choice most people would prefer to receive money for their electronics
Finding opportunities
Provide location services for donation or buyback programs for the user
- Connect users with donation centers and dropoff locations to recycle their old electronics
- Connect users with Buyback programs and options such as AppleCare, Best Buy, and Amazon
Educate user on data security
- Users are concerned on data security and privacy
- Users do not know how to restore phone settings and remove their data
Increase visibility and awareness by allowing a quick and easily accessible donation process
- Create a quick and easily accessible way to donate your electronics right on the device itself
Ideation
User persona: Consolidating my findings from initial surveys, I created a profile for a target user (college student with many electronics and not much time) to help uncover their main needs and goals. I drafted this persona to understand the user and their life in order to identify key pain points for the journey map.
Journey mapping: The journey map is meant to understand the user more clearly by mapping out a customer’s journey in the world and identifying key issues that arise in order to build a solution accordingly. This is customer journey map reflects the main people surveyed during the initial research, representing a busy student who purchased a new product and does not know nor has the time to figure out where to recycle his old product. This emphasizes the key issues that (1) people have a need to get rid of their old devices and (2) people are unaware of how to dispose of their electronics.
Design
Awareness design decisions: How can we raise awareness of recycling your electronic devices?
A website is not enough if no one is visiting it in the first place. The difficult part of this process was the marketing of the issue and coming up with creative ways to raise awareness of e-cycling. Evidently, the main issue is that people do not know about e-cycling and how to handle their electronics that no longer have use to them, which in turn causes people to hoard their devices or improperly throw away them away, further causing pollution. How can we create a quick and easily accessible experience to find the recycle drop-off webpage?
My initial thought was to ingrain something onto the settings section of the actual device. This would allow easy and immediate access, available right when you’re ready to throw it away. I considered a block on the settings device of your iPhone or a pop-up on your laptop, as shown below.
When I had users try this feature out, I found that many people do not use the dropdown access of the Apple bar as their go-to, much less for a webpage. When they go to Settings, they imagine a very practical use of it, like setting system preferences or shutting down, and do not view settings as anything beyond that. When asked about their thoughts, most users said they would probably forget that it is there. The settings bar wouldn’t be the first place that they would look when they’re ready to throw their laptop away. Logically, it seems that would be the same case with placing a recycle option within the settings of a mobile device. So maybe instead of seeking a solution internally, there might be better options with the external — -the physical device itself.
In search of a new approach, I asked users if they look anywhere before throwing out an old device or putting it away. While many just push it away until they need it again or find a way to sell it, some users reported that they sometimes look at the back to see the model of their laptop first. A new idea emerged: something can be ingrained onto the back of the physical mobile device, laptop, or computer.
It is most likely high in manufacturing costs to ingrain a QR code or additional text on the back of a device. So instead, I looked towards something more temporary and easily attainable, attachable, and removable, such as a sticker. This, to raise awareness of electronic waste, Ecodrop will distribute physical stickers to put onto the device.
The idea is to have a simple call to action with this sticker. The design is bland and simple to reflect the professional aesthetic that is already in place. I considered to add a QR code, but it takes away from the simplicity. After showing the idea in class, many peers agreed that QR codes are not as accessible as placing the actual website name if they had to choose between the two.
WEB DESIGN DECISIONS: Identify the most salient values of service
From the feedbacks I received from the focus group and the issues found in the scenario from the customer journey map, I had more clarity in what the design should include. I identified the main goal and the most important values of service that the website should include to raise awareness on how to recycle old devices as well as ease the process of doing so.
In terms of the website, I narrowed down the key features:
- Educate users on e-cycling and data security provisions.
- Locate nearest e-cycle drop-off location.
- Locate nearest available buyback locations.
- Visualize users’ location for convenience and usability
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Tools used: Adobe XD, Overflow, Adobe Illustrator
Prototyping & user testing
ROUND 1: LOW-FIDELITY ITERATION & USER TESTING
After developing a basic prototype from the user flow, I asked a 5 users to test the app to get a basic idea of how the user interacts with the website, major points of confusion, and what can be improved. This design, to me, seemed like an easy and convenient step-by-step process to finally guide the user to a map. Unfortunately, only 40% of the users tested understood the app and went through it with ease. When I looked back at my findings, these were the key issues I found that disturbed the user flow:
- The main issues were button placement, when users would want to move forward, they would use buttons that were actually meant to take the user to a section to educate the user rather than move forward to the next step
- Users felt overwhelmed by amount of tasks they needed to complete just to reach locator page
- Users were also unsure about whether they were in the buyback program or the donation program because there was no distinction between color.
Goals for Iteration 2:
- Make buttons to move forward / scroll down more noticeable and make education buttons more subtle
- Ease and minimize the process of location finding
- Create color distinction for different programs
ROUND 2: LOW-FIDELITY ITERATION & USER TESTING
After the feedback from the previous test, I realized that the structure of the information needs to be changed and I need to redesign the visual hierarchy and the information architecture. Since finding a drop-off location is the main point of this website, this should be the first stage that the user goes through, instead of entering their location as the last step of the process. This also enacts an immediate call to action rather than first going through the process of educating the user. I also reorganized the information process, whereas the “Program” section was attached to the geolocator and most people would ignore it before, now it opens them to a separate window where they cannot ignore it. This will help distinguish buyback vs. donation programs, along with color-coding them.
This test helped me decide important factors as I headed into designing the user interface of the website.
My main findings from this iteration of testing were:
- Users do not know what classifies as miscellaneous electronics
- If users click the “Does my device qualify?” button or any other link that redirects them to FAQ under Learn more, they would have to restart the process and this was tiring to them
- “Data Destruction” for the data security section is extreme wording; although it catches their attention, they hesitate to learn more about “destroying” their data because it is extreme
- The color code was too similar shades of green and users still had difficulty distinguishing the trade-in vs. donation
Goals for Iteration 3 prototype:
- Link the device types differentiation in the FAQ
- Create less subtle color distinction for different programs
- Change wording of important concepts to be more inviting
Final prototype
View and interact with the full prototype here
Reflection
Design for the user, not for yourself
At the beginning of this project, I was designing the website through my vision and what I would want to see, rather than what the user would want to see and what would help the user navigate. Since I had more background knowledge on e-waste after researching it extensively for this project, I have a different perspective on what the website needs to be rather than what the everyday user would need to see. The user testing process helped me see through my own biases and visions so that I could instead focus on designing with the user in mind.
Functionality trumps beauty: I generated about 15 iterations on the interface design of the home page alone. The goal was to make the design simple and minimalistic while still offering a lot of great content. I made a mistake of focusing too much on making it look nice and overlooked the usability and the main functions of the app. I also made a few prototyping errors with the overlay feature, but mistakes help you grow and I’ve become more competent in Adobe XD’s usage and animation tools as a result.
