Carbon X

Your green actions pay off

Timeline

Oct 2023 - Nov 2023

My Role

UX Researcher
UX Designer

Contribution

User Research, UX Design, Usability Testing, Visual Design, Team Coordination

Final Product

Earn Carbon Credits and cash rewards by taking green transportation.

Easy access to Eco-friendly Transportation

Users can easily find green transportation options.
Users can see how much carbon credits and an estimate of cash rewards they could earn.

Carbon Credit Marketplace

Users can redeem their carbon credits into cash rewards.
Alternatively, they can choose to exchange carbon credits for gift cards or vouchers from sustainable brands.

Real-time Carbon Footprint Tracking

Users can monitor and comprehend their real-time environmental impact.
The app delivers feedback on how users’ daily activities influence carbon emissions, empowering them to choose a more eco-conscious lifestyle.

Business Opportunity

Build a green connection between individuals and manufacturing companies

Many manufacturing companies face regulatory requirements related to carbon emissions. They buy carbon credits as part of their strategy to offset or neutralize their carbon emissions. Knowing that individuals can earn carbon credits by taking green actions, our group developed the idea of building a bridge between individuals and companies.

Market Landscape

There is a high demand for carbon credits, but a B2C approach is lacking.

With the idea in mind, we first looked into the market landscape.

Saturated B2B Market

Most carbon credit trading platforms operate B2B.

No B2C platform

A B2C platform is currently lacking in the market.

Next step is to test if people are willing to earn carbon credits by switching to green transportation.

Survey

Are people willing to switch their mode of transportation?

We designed a survey to test how much people are willing to use green transportation with monetary incentives.

Design Concept

Develop a platform where individuals can accumulate carbon credits by using green transportations and trade with companies in need of carbon credits to gain financial rewards.

Ideation

How Might We incentivize individuals to adopt greener transportation?

We did a How Might We Brainstorming session. Here are some ideas we came up with.

Challenge

Cash rewards can be earned is limited.

After some calculations, we realized that the amount of carbon credits can be earned by individuals taking green transportations is limited. People might not be motivated enough to take green transportation given the amount of cash rewards they can earn.

Exchange Carbon Credit for Vouchers

Users can exchange their carbon credits for vouchers or gift cards of these eco-friendly stores.
Establish collaboration with small eco-friendly businesses. These stores can provide coupons or gift cards for their products, and in return, we assist them in advertising and reaching their target audience.

Reflection

Takeaways

1. User research sometimes shows contradictory results.

For example, users may express willingness to take more green actions but then show hesitation when asked about their willingness to use green transportation. In such cases, I have learned to ask follow-up questions to clarify while avoiding leading questions.

2. Always listen to the users.

During the ideation stage, all group members agreed that including tokenization in the app would be fun. For example, instead of earning carbon credits directly, users could earn a fun token and use them for carbon trading. However, through rounds of user testing, we found that it introduced unnecessary complexity to the process and increased the learning curve. Eventually, we decided against that idea. Designers cannot get fixated on one idea. No matter how much we love an idea, what's best for the users is what's best for our product.

YIMING XIA