Recycle Right

UX Design
The Challenge
Most people I know recycle but they don’t know if they are doing it properly. In every corner of my life I’ve seen recyclable products put in the general waste bin or vice versa with the exclamations, ‘I wish I knew what to do’ or ‘it all goes to landfill anyway!’. This seems like an easy problem to fix and yet we’re still not there, put in the too hard basket for some and those with the will to do it right, left feeling unsure about their efforts.
‍
‍Recycle Right is an app based product that seeks to solve this, making information about recycling easily accessible and achievable. I undertook this challenge as a one person User Experience team to firstly see if this was indeed an issue, and how a solution would be received.
Defining The Problem
In order to identify the problem I started with some key hypotheses. People want to recycle, they’re not sure if they’re doing it right and recycling is confusing. To confirm my hypothesis I started with a simple survey sent out to the community. With 126 respondents from a broad demographic across the country I was satisfied I’d reached enough people to correctly confirm my hypothesis and define my problem.

Using the results from this survey I was able to confirm that all of my hypotheses were in fact correct and some insights into the communities frustrations were uncovered. I could now define my problem. How might we make information about recycling readily available so that we can improve recycling rates?
Discovery
To give myself a clear picture of what product would be useful for consumers I conducted a series of one on one interviews. As my budget was low (read: non-existent), I was only able to interview people in my own community in Melbourne. I had imagined this product to be adaptable across the country so I was concerned that my limited access to a broad demographic of participants would limit the insights gained. After reviewing my survey results it was clear that the issues experienced were consistent across the spectrum of participants, so I felt that the insights gained from my one-on-one interviews would also be experienced by most.

I synthesised the results from the one-on-one interviews and uncovered some important insights. Users need reassurance about where the recycling goes, information is perceived as too hard to find and not thorough enough and we need to lean on the positive emotions gained from knowing they are recycling correctly.

I further analysed these results, using a customer journey map and empathy map which uncovered some clear opportunities. Potential users wanted easy access to information on recycling at the point of purchase to enable a better choice, easy access to information when disposing of their waste and they wanted to increase their self satisfaction by being empowered to do the right thing.
Persona
Based on the data gathered, I created two proto personas. As recycling is something that effects everyone, I needed to create some personas that reflected two different types of person aligned with the want to recycle well. Meet Sue and Jayden.
Ideation
Armed with the insights gathered and with Jayden and Sue in focus, I began to put together a user flow. This process quickly revealed how I would be able to meet the users needs. What needed to be created was a transportable and easy to use source of truth for wherever you may be. This needed to be an app and it needed to be location specific.

From here I began putting pen to paper to nut out some wireframes. This process allowed me to understand quickly what features would be necessary in order to design for the insights and opportunities uncovered in the discovery phase. I then turned my wireframes into a low fidelity prototype based on three key actions; a product search for instructions, specific information about council processes to empower the user and suggestions on making a better choice.
Usability testing — Round 1
I moved to my first round of usability testing using my low fidelity prototype which I ran through with participants online. This was not ideal as I would have preferred a face to face interaction but i was forced use online testing due to the social distancing restrictions. Regardless, I was able to pick up some interesting feedback about the concept.

Overall the users were really excited by the concept and thought that the product would be useful and well received. Most of the pain points uncovered during testing were to do with the presentation of information.

Users found:
Revisiting my prototype now I was able refine my design.
— Round 2
The second round of testing was again conducted online with users running through a more refined prototype. Again, the content and concept were received really well. The feedback from this round helped to uncover some sticking points with navigating the prototype.
Learnings
As this was a project that I can see a lot of potential in, I had to be sure to remove my own biases. At times I found this difficult but made sure I was able to step back and review the findings without bias.

I like that this product empowers the user to make changes to their habits prior to even making a purchase of a disposable good. I also appreciate that the information is relevant to each council area meaning the application can be country wide — make once, use often.

Initially I was concerned that not being able to conduct face to face interviews during the testing phase would hinder valuable insights. However I think making clever use of technology has over come these hurdles. I designed the prototype for Android, anticipating that I would be using my own Android device to user test. I was interested to see how native Android users interacted differently with the app to native iOS and wondered if it may have been heightened by testing on a screen prototype rather than on a device.

I’m really excited by this concept and was surprised by where the research took my solution.
LINKEDINMEDIUM