Recharging our Earth
Roles
Divya Mavinkurve: UX Designer
Hayley Jang: UX Designer
Seamus McPeake: UX Designer
Yubo Zhao: UX Designer
Project Context
Designed for: UW HCDE User-Centered Design Class 2023
Duration: 10 Weeks
Project Deliverables
Service Design
Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Miro
PROBELM
While disposable vapes gain popularity among young adults, they are disposed of improperly and cause fires at the plants or pollute landfills.
💬 SCOPING DESIGN QUESTION
During our preliminary research for the project, we came across an article focused on disposable vapes causing recycling plant fires. This piqued our interest, as it seemed to be an issue that had been less widely discussed or had attempts to be tackled.
💡 DESIGN SOLUTION
ReVolt is a service designed to address the growing environmental threat posed by improper vape disposal. Our design solution focuses on increasing the convenience and awareness of proper vape disposal processes and techniques.
USER RESEARCH
To better understand the problem space, we conducted user research including 1 survey, 8 in-person and remote interviews, and secondary research. Our primary goals during this phase were to know the target users and understand the motivators or barriers to proper vape disposals.
Online Survey
1. Built an online survey and shared it in various online communities.
2. Identified the target user's age group and their common behavior regarding vape disposal.
Interviews
1. A deeper dig into qualitative data using an interview process.
2. 8 semi-structured interviews with 6 vape consumers and 2 vape store workers to learn about their current vape disposal process, and motivations and barriers to proper disposal.
INTERVIEW ANALYSIS
We performed a group affinity and content analysis and identified three main themes: Lack of awareness, inconvenient disposal process, and insufficient regulations.
🚨One interesting takeaway from an interview we conducted was a store owner who was aware that lithium-ion batteries are bad for the environment but continued to dispose of their vapes improperly.
“I know it's [putting disposable vapes in the trash] harmful, but I don't think anyone makes such efforts, and not many are aware... I wish there were better ways, but we just tell them to throw it away.”
- A vape store owner
Based on the key findings, we decided to narrow our focus with a revised design question centered on the users' pain points identified during our research
"How might we increase the convenience and awareness of proper vape disposal processes and techniques?"
PERSONAS
Based on our user research, we developed three personas to synthesize their key behaviors, goals, and frustrations and defined 5 design goals.
STORYBOARDING AND USER FLOWS (click to expand)
Visualizing our problem and potential solutions helped us empathize more, enabling our team to generate better design concepts
IDEATION
Brainstorming and Sketching
A total of 35 ideas were generated from the brainstorming session.
We then assessed the feasibility and effectiveness of each idea and selected three promising ideas.
Scoping
We narrowed down our scope to a single streamlined service design focusing on the primary user needs.
PROTOTYPE
After narrowing down our scope, we developed a low-fidelity prototype for usability testing. The low-fidelity paper prototype allowed us to identify major usability problems.
USER TESTING
Our user testing consisted of 3 different scenarios testing 3 different objects within our prototype. We asked users to first speak their thoughts out loud about each object and then ask more specific questions related to our goals for the objects.
Testing Goals
Key Results
Usability problem 1: Different expectations of outcome from each QR code
Design Changes:
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Provide more information about what information the QR code actually does (text explicitly stating that the QR code is related to recycling information).
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Make the QR code size and design consistent so there is no confusion about whether different QR codes do different things.
Usability problem 2: Participants misunderstood the recycling symbols
Design Changes:
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Create a symbol which will more clearly distinct vape recycling from typical recycling.
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Don’t limit ourselves purely to visual communication. Include labels.
FINAL DESIGN
Improvements in functionality and build quality was made to all of our products included in our service.
Product Packaging
Web Interface
FINAL DESIGN AT SHOWCASE
Next Steps and Learnings
Include incentives
Rewards programs to encourage users to properly recycle and eventually form a lasting habit.
Recycling plant detection
Printing scannable chips or stickers that can help recycling plants detect vapes in their lithium sorting facilities more easily than they currently can.
Improved design for optimized space
In the future, we would like to see larger-sized bins, equal to a normal waste bin, that feature a more attractive design to attract and inform more users of our service.
01
I believe that conducting an additional research method, such as the '5 whys', could have helped us identify deeper insights and saved time on analyzing findings among group members.
02
This team project taught me much about embracing ambiguity and asking the right questions. I am grateful to have collaborated with peers from diverse backgrounds. We learned from each other's unique ideas and skills.
FIN.
