Project Details
Project Date: Oct 19-20, 2019
Event: MadHacks 2019 Carbon
Challenge: Creatively Engineer Solutions for Sustainable Living
Role: Designer
Process
User Research
Brainstorm
Wireframe, Prototype
HTML/CSS coding
Tools
Pen & Papers
Survey Monkey
Adobe XD
Adobe Illustrator
Background
Madhacks is the University of Wisconsin's twice-annual 24 hours hackathon. The challenge of the hackathon is to create a solution for sustainable living. This was my first Hackathon ever! I formed a group with 3 other computer science students. My role was Design. My other computer sciences fellows focused on backend and programming.
Research Takeaways
Due to the time limitation, our group created a survey to understand people's perceptions of sustainable living as our research. The main idea is to understand how well people are educated with what sustainable living is and what are their approaches to living green.
Discovery Insights
1. Participants are lacking the motivation to live green.
2. Participants think sustainable living is a big commitment.
3. Participants find it hard to relate if they are making impacts by doing things like recycling.
Design Process
Ideation
We were inspired by Greta Thunberg's #fridayforfuture strike for climate change. We started from something small, and a habit that part of the general public already has which is an analogy of calorie counting apps. We eventually reach a consensus on the idea of creating a react tracking web app to show our users that they are making differences even if it was a small gesture.
However, to address users' pain points and design a solution that would benefit them, as well as achieve a sustainable living approach, we came up with the following features that come with our tracker.
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Incentivize users through a scoring system and a ranking leaderboard.
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Using creative and relatable message to encourage them
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Provide tips, articles of sustainable living to educate users on how to easily start a green living lifestyle.
Wireframe sketches of the web app
Iteration
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Business Model:
After conducting quick user research with 5 users, we realized that it was not practical for users to go on a web app every day to input the data without a big incentive. So we quickly changed our business model to target selling the app to institutions and companies that are aiming to improve their social responsibility on reducing the carbon footprint. The leaderboard mechanism would be a great inspiration for users to compete with each other, institutions or companies can then incentivize its users.
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Measurement unit:
also, it is difficult for users to input water consumption with the exact measurement unit. therefore, we decided to go for a more user-friendly approach which is to use descriptions that they can be more relatable.
Introducing Unbottlr
Unbottlr is a react web app that tracks water consumption, food waste, and plastic usage.
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After 24 hours...
We're honored to receive the most likes and votes in 2 hours of internal voting.
24 hours is short and intense, please check out our final product here: https://devpost.com/software/unbottlr.
I learned so much from my fellow contestants and mentors in my first hackathon in terms of design and teamwork. Brainstorming on-site was one of the things I want to improve next time as it took some of our precious time from working on our prototype. I will continue to attend more hackathons or challenges to enhance my problem-solving skills.