RecycleMe
Designing for effective recycling of waste across the college campus
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Team
​Collaborated with 3 other HCI graduate students as part of this project.
(2 Researchers and 2 Designers)
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What did I do?
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User Interviews and Observations
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Affinity and Empathy Mapping
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Wireframes for Community flow
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UI Design for Community flow
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Project Overview
Improper recycling is a huge problem in the United States. Despite efforts to promote recycling, students often exhibit improper recycling habits, leading to a significant amount of waste ending up in landfills. Effectively recycling products like paper, metal, cardboard, and plastic can reduce the size of landfills by half. Hence, tackling the problem of recycling is more crucial now than ever.
The objective of this project is to understand the root causes of improper recycling habits and to develop a solution that promotes proper recycling practices among students.
So, who the targeted users are?
Students of Indiana University living on-campus/ off-campus.
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The User Problem
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User Awareness - resolving confusion around what kind of trash goes where
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User Motivation - solving for behavioral consistency and providing opportunities for the highly motivated to create more impact.
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The Solution
We propose a multifaceted solution that involves:
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Poster redesign near trash bins
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A mobile application to educate users
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Starting a Recycling club
Through our solution, we are trying to eliminate the confusion and ignorance around trash management and instill implicit motivation among the users.
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Try it yourself...
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Observations
To understand more about user behavior, we observed students disposing of waste around the campus near the dining hall, cafeteria, and library. We noticed students throwing recyclable and reusable items into landfill bins.
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Interviews
Our team conducted 8 interviews with students, and I personally interviewed 2 of them. The results revealed a common theme of confusion and frustration among students regarding waste disposal. Specifically, they expressed confusion about how to properly dispose of waste and frustration with unclear instructions. Additionally, 3 of the interviewees highlighted unawareness of recycling impact, which they felt contributed to their apathy towards correct recycling practices.
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Secondary Research
Research has found that 94% of Americans support recycling and 74% say it should be a top priority. But only about 35% of people actually recycle. The leading reason behind this poor percentage value is the Americans’ lack of knowledge and awareness. According to NYPost, “more than half of Americans are not very sure of what to recycle. In a survey including around 2000 Americans, 62% of the people think that due to their lack of knowledge, they are recycling incorrectly”.
31%
say they always recycle a
recyclable item
Only
53%
About
believe greasy pizza boxes can be recycled
68%
About
believe used plastic utensils can be recycled
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Affinity Diagram
The Affinity Diagram was utilized to collect and organize insights from interviews, observations, and research, providing a comprehensive view of the issue and enabling the formulation of a problem statement. This facilitated the identification of relationships and patterns within the data.
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User Empathy Map
To understand and empathize with our user group before creating a user persona, Empathy Map was used which helped to prioritize the user needs. The data from the real users is collated to create a user persona later
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User Persona
Further in our research process, we created a user persona to flesh out the information gathered in the empathy map into more concrete and detailed descriptions of user archetypes. Persona aided us in keeping the user at the center of the design process and helping to create empathy for the user's needs, goals, and behaviors.
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The Core Problem
How might we design for busy university students to eliminate their confusion and encourage them to recycle properly and consistently, while taking into account their need for convenience?
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Ideation Mind Map (Brainstorming)
Once the core problem is identified, the next step is to generate a large number of ideas, regardless of their feasibility or practicality. This was done individually by each team member first and as a team later. All the ideas generated in this stage were assessed based on their potential value to users and the business, feasibility, and technical constraints. A Mind Map was created to get the bigger picture of our ideation.
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Storyboarding
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Poster Redesign
We understood that a lot of the confusion around trash disposal could be efficiently solved through a simple redesign of the illustrations present on the recycling bins. This was a fast, cheap solution to one of our main issues. This would also serve as an access point for the Mobile Application.
The poster was strategically placed in 2 areas with high student traffic. During our observation, we noted that the students found the new poster to be engaging and easily understandable. They took a moment to review the poster before disposing of their waste. In a follow-up survey, all 3 students queried agreed that the new design was easy to comprehend thanks to its use of easy-to-understand illustrations.
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Information Architecture for Mobile Application
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Testing with the Users
Our team performed usability testing on the mobile application by recruiting 5 users in total. We created the following series of tasks for them to complete using the product and monitored their actions and interactions while they performed these tasks.
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Searching for and Scanning an item to find out whether it is recyclable or not
Task success rate: 5/5
Time on task: Users finished the task in less than 20 seconds on an average -
Joining the community and registering for an event
Task success rate: 5/5
Time on task: Users finished the task in 20 to 30 seconds on an average -
Creating an event as an admin
Task success rate: 2/5
Time on task: On average, the failed users took around 1 minute -
Navigating to the nearest collection center
Task success rate: 5/5
Time on task: On average, users took 15 seconds to finish the task
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3 out of 5 participants expressed excitement and eagerness to join the community. However, 1 participant was uncertain, but indicated they would join if the events were of interest to them. On the other hand, 1 participant stated that they were not as inclined towards community membership. These results inform me of the potential areas for improvement and the need to make community events more appealing to a wider audience.
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Low-fidelity Wireframes
Wireframes 1 to 4: Lo-fi wireframes of Home screen, Item Search and Item Details Screens
Wireframes 5 to 9: Lo-fi wireframes of Community Member, Community Admin, and Game Screens
Wireframes 10 to 13: Lo-fi wireframes of Nearest Disposal Site and Item Scanner Screens
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High-fidelity Wireframes
App Home Screen
Members are presented with the following screen after login. Members can view the events that are planned by the Recycling Club and can register for the events they are interested in.
The screen also shows statistics on the impact that the club has created. This helps the members to feel motivated.
Members can also vote for the upcoming events. The poll is created by an admin.
Item Search Screen
Item Search Result Screen
Item Details Screen
Item Scanner Screen
Community feature - Member landing page
Members are presented with the following screen after login. Members can view the events that are planned by the Recycling Club and can register for the events they are interested in.
The screen also shows statistics on the impact that the club has created. This helps the members to feel motivated.
Members can also vote for the upcoming events. The poll is created by an admin.
Event Description Screen
Community Moderator View
Add Events, Announcements and Polls
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Final Thoughts
RecycleMe is the first project I worked on that involved an end-to-end design process. Working on this project, I familiarized myself with design practices, methods, and ethics. The problem space might seem simple and trivial but while we delve deep into the research, we realize the importance of tackling this problem.
If we had more time, we would perform more brainstorming sessions with the potential users. This would help us evaluate the user needs and user expectations of the solution.
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What did I learn?
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How to steer user interviews in a better way
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Importance of observation sessions to understand user behavior.
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How penalizing and incentivizing can distort user motivation (learned from Psychology of HCI)
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Future Scope
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The application can be used by other universities as well for managing recyclable waste effectively
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Integrating the app with other IU applications
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Make sure that the application complies to Accessibility Standards