Action Confusion: There are many different sources of advice on reducing individual carbon emissions , people often express confusion or disagree on the most effective way an individual could reduce their impact.
Impracticality & Apathy: Following on from the previous point, people often said that the guidance around reducing their personal impact is not relevant or too impractical to implement effectively into their current lifestyles.
Limited Impact: Most carbon emissions come from Australian businesses / industry and not the individual; this can seemingly create the perception that it "isn’t my duty" to change to be more sustainable.
Accurate Impact Understanding : Users are able to gain an accurate picture of their carbon footprint through undertaking a comprehensive “carbon quiz” that accesses their impact across five contributing factors; Energy, Travel, Waste, Purchases & Diet. People can inspect and gain insight into their impact through results ( data visualisation ) that give context their carbon footprint. We measure impact using understandable data points that seek to encourage and drive people towards taking action.
Understanding Motivational Factors: Intrinsic motivation is stronger and lasts longer than extrinsic motivations. When you connect extrinsic rewards to an intrinsic task such as climate action it results in people becoming less interested, less creative, worse at problem solving, and prone to cheating. this is called “The Over-justifacation Effect”.
Goal Creation: People are incentivised to create their own reduction goal to drive them towards reducing their footprint. In conjunction with setting a goal people are given a clear roadmap of challenges that they can undertake in order to reach this goal, taking the guess work and uncertainty out of taking action.
Clear Challenges : These challenges are impactful solutions that directly address lifestyle habits and behaviours that contribute towards a persons carbon footprint. We outline simple solutions step by step that a person can to follow to make changes to their lifestyle that result in reductions.
Measuring Success: At each stage we measured the success of our design through the use of the Six Sigma framework methodology ( (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control ) combined with the Google HEART framework (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success ).
We assessed our users by observing their behaviour as they completed a series of goal oriented tasks. We measured task success rate, time on task, navigation, and error occurrence rate. This is how we established baseline measurements from which we exposed problems and improved features.
In summary this product delivers value to our users by helping them understand and gain insight into their personal environmental impact. Once they gain this understanding our product gives them simple solutions and pathways to take action and reduce their carbon footprint.
