Inspiring people to repurpose things that would otherwise be treated as rubbish
Climate change is making summers even hotter. Energy bills are soaring and foreseeing tough winters ahead. It might sound cliché, but the planet is giving its constant warning. More people are under its direct impact. Yet too few have realized what they can do to change the course of environmental degradation. People carry on with their usual lifestyles, exploiting resources and generating waste.
Recyclopia aims to be the platform where people can share creative ideas about recycling and repurposing idle or used items and get inspired by others. Meanwhile, it carries the mission to change people’s lifestyle little by little by encouraging them to take on daily challenges.
People don’t have a clear idea of how much domestic waste they generate each day in their household
People don’t feel the incentive of actively taking actions
People don’t feel connected with each other, thus having no intention to give back and keep the community alive and growing
I surveyed 78 people to learn about their attitudes towards the environment; the actions that they have been taking; their willingness to take actions and what impact of environmental change they have felt.
A competitive audit was conducted with 2 direct competitors and 3 indirect competitors. The purpose of the audit is to identify key features and mechanisms of these platforms and find out opportunities for Recyclopia to further address user needs and stand out from the crowd.
After screening, I selected 5 participants (3 females, 2 males), 2 of whom have an active voice in their local communities, promoting environment protection, and the rest believe that they can make a change to the environment if told how to do so. I aimed to understand what are user goals; how will users use the app and their experience with other similar products on the market. The following 2 personas are then created based on the common and prominent traits of the participants found during the interview.
Age: 19 years old
Occupation: High school student
Hometown: Brighton
State: Living at home with her parents and a younger sister
Change old habits to avoid wasting more resources
Raise people’s consciousness about the environment
Reach a wider audience to have a bigger collective impact on the environment
Businesses are still exploiting more resources than they should
Her parents refused to cook vegetarian meals more often
Don’t have a good platform to reach audience beyond her local community
I need to do something about the future of our people, and stop listening to blah blah blah from adults who should protect us and the planet but failed”
Age: 43 years old
Occupation: Support ticket engineer
Hometown: Liverpool
State: Living with his wife and 2 kids
Find a second home or a better purpose for his family’s clutter
Learn more about things he can do to protect the environment
Having to pay rising energy bills
Weather is becoming too drastic to cope with
I doubt if I will ever turn vegan, but I will do what I can before it’s too late!
After foundational research, I used How Might We and Crazy Eight to come up with as many ideas as possible to address users needs, asking questions and drafting potential solutions. Since I was a team of one, I forced myself to ideate in several separate settings, trying to put on different characters to help me think outside the box.
Recyclopia is a social media platform dedicated to the environment where users are encouraged to share creative ways of repurposing used items and learn from each other, thus devoting an ever more impactful collective effort to our planet.
What are users’ actual user journey? How many different types of common patterns are there?
What is the most popular search keyword/community discussion topic?
What are the average and median time between adding a task and completing a task?
What are the most popular challenges? What do users want to see as challenges?
What is the percentage of people choosing to share their result in the community when completing a task?