UX case study: Helping people adopt sustainable habits

Published in

UX Planet

10 min readAug 22, 2020

Just a casual afternoon, I was scrolling on LinkedIN and noticed a post about a design challenge that intrigued me. The goal of the challenge is to help people reduce their carbon footprint in order to help our planet. I’m an advocate for sustainable living so I decided on the spot that I want to involve myself in this effort.

Case study overview

Challenge: Help people reduce or replace meat from their diets.

Goal: Reduce the carbon footprint in order to help our planet.

Why I chose this challenge: Food is a major contributor to carbon footprints, and meat in particular is an issue. Livestock is responsible for a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and beef is one of the biggest contributors. Last year, the medical journal The Lancet reported that global consumption of red meat needs to fall by 50 percent by 2050 for us to “remain within a safe operating space” on climate change. And in 2018, the journal Nature reported that beef consumption in Western countries needs to fall by 90 percent.

It’s our duty as designers to create products that not only meet the business and users needs and goals, but also products that can help fight the climate crisis that we are in.

My role: Research, UX, UI

Tools: Sketch, Miro, Zoom, Invision, ProtoPie

Duration: 10 days

Here we go.

1. Discover

I started with secondary research to gain a broader understanding of the problem at hand and to have a solid starting point for user interviews. I found lots of research papers and articles about the connection between the way we eat and climate change.

For example, The Guardian wrote:

“Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system’s impact on the environment. In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses.”

Enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet’s ability to feed the 10 billion people expected to be on the planet in a few decades.

“We know food choices are very personal, and that behaviour change can be difficult to encourage, but the evidence is now unequivocal — we need to change our diets if we are to have a sustainable future. The fact that it will also make us healthier makes it a no-brainer.”

Interviews

For this challenge I used interviews as the main research method, because it’s a sensitive subject for most people and I wanted to be able to ask WHY or other follow up questions, have an in-depth understanding of the audience’s values, perceptions, and experience while gaining insights.

I chose to conduct semi-structured interviews in order to have a free-flowing conversations, but I still loosely followed a script I prepared before with some pre-determined set of topics that I knew to be relevant for my project.

My audience is made out of people who are already eating plant-based, but also made out of people that need incentives and support in order to reduce or eliminate consumption of meat or dairy products.

First, I talked to 6 people who already chose this meat-less lifestyle. I asked about their motivations to go meat-free, the struggles they encountered when they first reduced or replaced meat, I asked what they wish they knew earlier, and what is missing from their routines, what digital products they use or if there’s some other thing they lack.

Then, I focused on people who are eating meat, because I had a hunch that they are miss-informed or unaware of the connections between their eating habits and global warming or other environmental problems. I wanted to understand better their opinion, their concerns about eating plant-based or at least reducing meat portions. It’s not enough to focus on the people who already eat plant-based foods if we want to help the planet. We have to think about the bigger picture if we truly want to make a difference.

So I scheduled more interviews with some acquaintances that I knew were heavy meat-eaters, to validate the assumption I had and understand if there is any way that I can help them think less reluctantly about lowering the rates of meat consumption.

I used open-ended questions to create a safe space for them to express freely and I asked why a lot.

Both the sessions with plant-based people and with meat-eaters were very insightful.

Key findings

My assumption was validated, most people are not aware of the animal agriculture’s impact on climate change.
Most people are uninformed about what a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle means and they have lots of preconceptions about this kind of lifestyle.
Some of them are willing to learn more and educate themselves, but they need support with that.
Main concern was not knowing how to properly eat in order to get all the essential amino-acids our bodies need to function properly.
When first changing their lifestyle, vegans were concerned about deficiencies, meal-planning and not finding enough places to eat when going out.
The main reason plant-based people chose this lifestyle is on account of health and environmental issues.

Competitive analysis

I continued the discovery phase by identifying companies and products that are trying to solve the same problem and make life easier while transitioning to a meat-less diet.

After, I did a competitive analysis that guided me in finding the strengths and weaknesses of my competitors. I analyzed and compared their content, then I identified areas of improvement.

2. Define the problem

I usually use this phase to fully understand the goal of my design project, to articulate the design problem and provide a clear objective to work towards.

I used the affinity diagram method to capture and synthesise my research findings. Here you can see the clusters I created with insights from the interviews. I grouped them and I created themes that will help me further with persona creation.

This step helped me identify a couple strategy points that would effectively inform the rest of the design process.

Affinity mapping

Persona — or how to keep the user at the heart of everything you do.

I created a persona to better illustrate the main people I’d find solutions for. I regularly use personas as a guide and to help me move on to the ideation phase. They define expectations, concerns, motivations, and are really helpful when it comes to designing a product that will satisfy user needs.

Problem statement

The northern star of the design process

I learned that a problem statement needs to be actionable and meaningful in order to identify the gap between the problem and the desired state or the goal of a product.

3. Ideate

I broke down the ideation phase in two parts, through divergent exercises I explored a range of possibilities and through convergent exercises I started thinking narrowly and I identified viable solutions.

I used How-Might-We questions as a way to frame my ideation, and to help launch a brainstorming session. The idea here is to create questions that inspire meaningful and relevant ideas.

I continued the ideation process by playing around with the SCAMPER exercise. I like this a lot because it forces you to think outside the box and it empowers innovation. As a starting point I used the “21 day vegan kickstart” app that’s meant to support people while transitioning to a meat-less diet, or just reducing the quantity of meat they consume.

Value Map

This helped me tackle the core challenge — creating compelling products customers wants to use (or buy). A strong value proposition can be the foundation of a great design.

Prioritization matrix

Select what ideas to sketch and prototype.

Main take aways from ideation:

During competitive analysis I found that most of my competitors have terrible reviews and an overall poor UX and UI, so I figured the best approach to solve this problem was to create a concept of a new app to bring more value. Sometimes starting from scratch is better.
At the core of the app is the AI assistant trained to answer basic plant-based questions, guide the user through this journey, perform simple tasks like showing shopping list, showing meal plan, explaining the nutritional value and offering nuggets of information that will broaden users knowledge on vegan issues, recommend books, articles, podcasts and so on. The main idea is to have all those things unified in the same app to make the user’s life easier.
Other features I decided to explore further: carbon footprint calculator, working with a nutrition professional to establish meal plans, daily nutritional info, food tracker, shopping lists based on the meal plan, how to cook, reminders to help people stay on track, challenges, prizes, restaurant recommendations and discounts.

Information Architecture

I started with IA, simply because the users need to be able to FIND content before they can USE it, more exactly findability precedes usability.

The map and user flow advised the key screens that I created as a low-fidelity wireframe.

The sitemap helped me determine where content should go and how it should navigate within the context of the app. Here you can get a glimpse of the breadth and depth of the navigation.

I built a user flow to figure out how the pages seen above flow together and how the system interacts with user behavior. While providing clarity, user flows also informed the wireframe process in designing a suitable structure and hierarchy.

Happy path task flow

4. Prototype

I created a few low-fidelity screens for the first round of user testing session.

While creating these screens I focused on:

Leveraging existing mental models of people, because we approach every new system with a mental model in mind and we presume how the system could work based on our experience with other systems that are similar.
Minimizing users’ cognitive loads and decision-making time
Maintaining consistent standards
Keeping things intuitive and avoiding cognitive friction
Making design choices that will be efficient and engaging.
Providing context, showing how everything interconnects.
Not hiding important features and information.

5. Test

Since this was a time-boxed challenge and I’ve discovered it not long before the deadline, I did not have enough time to create screens for every task, scenario or use-case for the first round of testing, so I went for an exploratory kind of session where I asked the participants to give their opinion about what they saw, express their impressions about the concept, find out if there’s something confusing and discover their assumptions about the purpose of the app.

I used Invision to test the screens with 4 of the people I interviewed at the beginning of the project. I would have wanted this to be an in-person experience so I could decipher their body language cues, but considering the fact that we are going through a global pandemic, I had to settle for Zoom calls.

I shared my screen and gave the other person remote control over my mouse so I can evaluate how he engaged with the proposed screens. I was really curious how my virtual assistant idea will be received by my audience.

Key findings:

All of them loved the AI capability, they were interested in playing around and said that capability would be useful for both plant-based people and for those transitioning to this life-style.
Three users said they’d expect to answer questions about their food preferences and existing life-style in the onboarding process.
Navigation is easy to find and use, calls to actions are clear.
Language and tone used are appropriate.
The microphone option should be emphasized.

Testing assisted me in finding out my audience’s expectations of the app, their ability to differentiate between elements of each page and the value of the capabilities presented.

6. Iterate

Based on the findings from the exploratory testing, I started iterating and came up with a low-fidelity wireframe.

Low-fidelity screens after the first round of testing

For the second round of usability testing, I decided to use high fidelity screens, since one of my goals for this year is to improve my UI skills.

Sneak peek:

Next steps:

I scheduled a few usability sessions for next week to determine what issues people are encountering while interacting with the prototype, to gather unbiased feedback and get insights that will help me create a better overall user experience for my audience. There are still plenty to iterate on and improve the usability of this concept.
Now I’m working on creating a task-based usability test plan for the next testing sessions.
I’ll update this post with my findings after the sessions.

P.S. I strongly believe we need to raise awareness between the climate crisis and animal consumption in every way we can.

If you want to get involved in the usability sessions, or if you have any ideas on how to improve this concept, or if you just want to say hi, let’s chat