Scraps
Scraps is an online platform that brings together an environmentally conscious community by trading (i.e. seeking and donating) scrap materials.
Scraps is an online platform that brings together an environmentally conscious community by trading (i.e. seeking and donating) scrap materials.
It all started when I came to Toronto, Canada. I noticed the amount of art installations made out of recycled materials all around the city. Inspired by this, I thought what if, people around the area gathered their recyclables to create this project possible? We’d have less issues on recycling contamination and there will be more people encouraged to recycle.Many artists are not afraid to show activism through their art and they are not afraid to influence change. Therefore, I took this topic as a design challenge to integrate art and the environment and came up with Scraps — a mobile application dedicated to encourage people to recycle better.
Scraps purpose is to encourage recycling practices through a collaborative experience that may benefit all the stakeholders involved (i.e. all user groups, the government and the environment). Users of Scraps are able to do the following on the app:Donate their recyclable items to artists Earn money in exchange for their scrapsSpend the earned money (i.e. buy movie tickets, pay bills, as payment in any stores)
During the empathy phase of my project, I conducted a concept validation survey and user interviews in order to verify the need of my idea and to get a better understanding of user frustrations and needs. I’ve sent out the survey and 21 people have responded.
Key findings
> Rewards, convenience and social benefits are the top 3 motivators to boost recycling habits.
> 71% of my survey respondents admit that they don’t know how to properly recycle.
> 90% of my survey respondents don’t have any idea where wastes go.
Based on the key findings and insights gathered from the user research, I created two personas to help the team and myself relate to both user needs and pain-points.
I focused on Amy’s journey for this design challenge. We documented every step of her journey: what makes her happy, her pain-points, what questions she may have and frustrations she encounters in order to achieve her recycling goal.
We kicked off the design process by brainstorming the appropriate user flow based from our findings from the user research phase. The user research helped the team prioritize what our users want to do from the platform and what goals they want to achieve.
After a few weeks of drafting the architecture, using card sorting and tree testing methods, and a few months of iterations, we finally arrived to the final architecture of the platform, as you are able to see below.
Before we even thought about how we’re going to design the digital platform, we thought about what content are needed to help and inform users what our product is all about. This includes, heading titles, voice and tone of the content.
One the branding has been set, we moved on to creating the style guide to have a set guideline on what the platform should look like. This is by far, the most difficult part for me because there are just too many choices of colors, buttons, icons, fonts — thankfully, I had my team’s expertise to help me out!
The fun part!
Designing wireframes has to be my most favorite part of User Experience Design. There’s a lot of work and iteration, user testings and heuristics analysis that go into deciding what the interface should look like. That’s what I like about this phase — it’s all about translating all the information and insights from our user research onto an interface.
The key modification from the initial draft to the final wireframe is that users prefer infinite scrolling better. It makes them choose and decide which campaign they want to donate to much quicker.
The team used Figma because it fosters collaboration and efficiency.
User testings were one of the most exciting phases of this design challenge because I was able to further improve my prototype. Before finalizing the product, I did a few testing rounds in order to reveal possible usability problems.
I have asked 5 participants who fit the following criteria:Users who are interested in recycling and creating environmental impactUsers who are active in recyclingUsers who are not active in recyclingI have found 5 users who fit my target persona from my social media (i.e. Instagram and Facebook) by posting about the study and they have willingly volunteered their time to participate.
After all the work that us, as a team, have accomplished, we are very proud of the result and the digital solution we came up with. Scraps has become my baby and to see it grow as a concept to a product that has a potential to be programmed makes me happy — this is why I am a UX Designer!
Project Management - overseeing the project as a whole with a team of two.
Strategic planning and Analytics - looking for strategies to market the product to the right audience/users.
Prototyping
Heuristics Evaluation
Usability Testing