Project Turf

Vision Video

Research Methods

After deciding to focus on the problem area of "Recycling in America", we spent multiple weeks going through extensive research, gathering as many insights as we could to help shape the digital product we would eventually make. We conducted various forms of secondary research such as ethnographic research and competitor analysis, however I highlighted some of our more impact research discoveries below:

• General Survey: We first created a general survey to understand the general population's understanding and opinions on recycling. Some of the major insights we gather from this were that people are widely more motivated to recycle from the moral aspect than any monetary reward and that people are still very confused about recycling in general
• Town Watching: Multiple town watching experiments at various locations were conducted to analyze the behavior of recycling in public spaces. Our main insight from these tests were that there is often an issue with both classification of the receptacles and incentives to focus on the act of recycling, which ends with people using whichever receptacles is easiest for them.
• User Interview: As one of our last and most important research methods for our project, we went out in public and asked volunteers multiple questions specific to their opinions on recycling in public and what kinds of incentives would be most effective. We found out that an overwhelming amount of people want to understand and see their impact from recycling, both towards the environment and their community. They also agreed with the idea of having a competitive aspect of recycling, as it is generally a fun and natural incentive.

Understanding the User

After collecting all of our data, we created an affinity map to derive ideas and insights with what specific problems to solve and how to organize them.

Personas and Journey Maps

To visualize who are product should and shouldn't target, we created a collection of personas. We also created user journey maps to fully understand the scope of behaviors that our users will be having and any pain points with those behaviors.

Wireframing and Testing

Once we understood our target audience and what solutions we wanted to create for the problems we were trying to solve, we started ideating, creating an information architecture and eventually wireframes for our app.

Once we got feedback from our lo-fi interfaces, we created a Mid-fi version of our product and created a prototype of it to use for user testing. We also created a lo-fi version of our physical prototype and had users go through a mock version of the behavior a typical user would go through. We gathered many insights from these tests, which shaped our final product.

Final Product