CRBN

Easy steps to a BIG impact.

I have always tried to make environmentally conscious decisions in my life and have always wanted to know how my habits actually affected the Earth I’m living on, but it was always hard to track my environmental impact and find specific, personalized ways to improve it. I thought, why not create a product that could help users like me who are looking to learn more about their footprint and are looking for easy ways to make a BIG impact.

Problem

Today, more than ever, there is more of an importance to be conscious about your environmental footprint, but it’s hard to track your impact and know ways to reduce your footprint. CRBN makes it easier to track your impact and make create conscious habits.

My Role

• Primary and secondary research

• Conducted initial user interviews

• Develop user stories and user flows

• Sketch and wireframe initial app screens

Scope and Constraints

• Tools: Sketch, Invision, Photoshop

• Gaps: only designed and developed for three main red routes: getting started/connecting utility accounts; reviewing the dashboard, resources, actions, and partners sections; navigating the community section by liking, sharing, commenting, uploading, and scrolling through feeds.

How Might We?

1. How can we teach people more about sustainability and their environmental impact? 

2. How can we support and guide people to break old habits and create new conscious ones?

3. How might we help people save money while helping to save the environment?

Target Audience

• Any gender

• 25 - 40 years old

• Owns a smartphone and uses it often for daily activities

• Environmentally- and budget-conscious

• Looking to make impactful changes in their daily habits

How It All Began.

The process began first by writing my ideas out with a pen and paper. Words have helped to inspire the designs and aspirations.

With the theme and goals established, I started with secondary and primary research to help drive my ideas into actual problem-solving solutions.

Inspiring | Helpful | Trustworthy | Caring | Supportive 

Secondary Research

Industry Vocabulary

The ecological footprint is a method promoted by the Global Footprint Network to measure human demand on natural capital, i.e. the quantity of nature it takes to support people or an economy. It tracks this demand through an ecological accounting system. The accounts contrast the biologically productive area people use for their consumption to the biologically productive area available within a region or the world (biocapacity, the productive area that can regenerate what people demand from nature). In short, it is a measure of human impact on the environment. [1]

Biocapacity of an ecosystem is an estimate of its production of certain biological materials such as natural resources, and its absorption and filtering of other materials such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is the productive area that can regenerate what people demand from nature.

Biocapacity is expressed in terms of global hectares per person, thus is dependent on human population. A global hectare is an adjusted unit that represents the average biological productivity of all productive hectares on Earth in a given year.

For example, there were 12.2 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water areas on this planet in 2016. Dividing by the number of people alive in that year, 7.4 billion, gives a biocapacity of 1.6 global hectares per person. These 1.6 global hectares includes the areas for wild species that compete with people for space. [2]

Footprint assessments show how big humanity's demand is compared to what Earth can renew

An environmental impact is defined as any change to the environment, whether adverse or beneficial, resulting from a facility's activities, products, or services. [3]

1. "Ecological footprint - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint. Accessed 20 May. 2020.

2. "Environmental impact assessment - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_assessment. Accessed 20 May. 2020.

3. "Environmental Impact - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/environmental-impact. Accessed 20 May. 2020.

Primary Research — User Interviews

The interviews provided insights that led to user stories, affinity maps, and eventually an MVP of three red routes.

Mapping

Affinity Maps

Empathy Maps

Wireframes

User Wireflows

High-Fidelity Mockups

Conclusion

Due to our current environmental status, there’s an urgent importance to be conscious about our impact on the Earth and it’s resources. The problem is, it can be hard to track your impact and know ways to reduce your footprint. The goal of this project was to make it easier to users to track their impact by calculating their overall usage of utilities and providing resources to improve their overall footprint. CRBN is able to do so by conducting an ecological footprint analysis of each user. To do this, users can connect their utility accounts (i.e. water, gas, electricity) to the app and it will automatically extract the data or a user can manually enter the data in their dashboard. This data is then used to determine the user’s biocapacity (shown in global hectares).

CRBN allows user to easily access their information in an easy to understand format. They are also provided with resources and actions they can take to reduce their overall environmental impact. With the community feature, users are able to share their improvements, other resources they find, and support one another. Similar to other social apps, CRBN allows user’s to follow people; create posts; and like, share and comment on other users’ posts. This feature was created to help incentives users to continue using the app and making conscious habits to continually improve their environmental footprint.