The Trade-off Problem :

How can we enable people to take pro-environmental actions without significant self-sacrifice?

Known obstacles :

1. Lack of time and stamina

People are already exhausted from the demand of daily life. Asking for additional sacrific can be challenging for them.

2. Low accessibility to pro-environmental resources

1) Outdated information about local sustainability services and programs

2) Communities have low discoverbility or have high entry barriers

Objective

Increase the discoverability of existing eco-friendly business, programs, and communities by leveling up information sufficiency and social incentives.

User Research

Insight 1

When looking for eco-friendly businesses, users care the most about:
1. Location
2. Approches to acheive sustainability
3. User reviews
4. Real world or online friends' engagement
5. Pictures

Insight 2

Most respondents acknowledge that they are not doing enough for the environment.

Insight 3

Pro-environmental behavior can be a sensitive topic to some people.

Insight 4

Social ties (friends and acquaintances) have a positive impact on one's tendency to attend an event that is not of their own interest.
However, online user opinions when in large volumnes also heavily impact one's decision of going to an event or not.

Solution

We aim at building a platform that integrates and categorizes information about local eco-friendly services. Using its sorting tool, users can find the ones that are at their easiest reach and fitting their personal sustainability goals. The integration of socialization features aim at nudging users to socialize and get more involved.

Design of Info Card

To apply the insights extracted from research results, we designed the info card in favor of ensuring the saliency of location, sustainable approaches, and user reviews, and include elements to appeal to social bonds.

Reflections and Future Work

Sustainability is a slow and collective process. A good tool that saves individuals time and energy to find the easiest ways contributing to the environment is in urgent need. Green it! achieves this by collecting and restructuring information about sustainability resources. Socialization elements are another key feature of this application. Compared to other listing apps, Green it! incorporates various elements to motivate users with social cues.

Aiming at greater information efficiency, future work could focus on conducting more user testings with larger sample sizes and eye-tracking equipments with higher accuracy.

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Overview