Pulito.
Building a community of
good-doers of the environment
Role
Asset Designer
UI Designer
Platforms
Illustrator
Figma
InVision
Duration
12 hours
Date
2019
overview
Background
On March 15th the University of Waterloo’s St. Paul’s College
hosted an Environmental Design Challenge. This event was sponsored
by Environmental and Climate Change Canada. ECCC developed their
Pollution Prevention (P2) Resource Finder; it is described as
“Canada's one-stop database of online pollution prevention resources.”
P2 Finder & Its Pain Point
The P2 finder enables individuals to find practical pollution prevention tips, tools, and guidance to make more sustainable choices in their everyday life. It includes articles and small “hacks” that eliminate waste and encourages sustainability. The P2 finder can be accessed on the Government of Canada website, but it can still be inaccessible due to the update of our technologies and ways of accessing information.
Challenge
How might we create a mobile digital solution to empower youth and those that interact with youth engage with pollution prevention information?
research
Market
As the challenge outlined the importance of “youth participation”
we thought that the “youth” is a large and vague market. We decided
to focus on a specific kind of youth where they are in the middle of
learning to live an independent life, turning their focus not only their
education but their well-being – university students residing on campus (residents).
As university students ourselves, we are constantly learning how to become
independent and continuously try to find ‘hacks’ to make our everyday lives easier.
If we targeted individuals who are always curious and in a time of their lives where
they are figuring things out, we can help them develop good habits especially in the
realm of pollution prevention choices.
Students' Values
From further reserach personal experiences, there are five things that the student
market values the most:
1. Grades, 2. Competition (friendly), 3. Awareness, 4. #trends, 5. Shock factor
(sometimes the unexpected has positive outcomes!)
Must Haves
1. Accessibility & Ease of Access
easy to navigate through, easy to understand, easy to find
AODA
approved (accessibility approved and follows the standards).
2. Designed for the Student Market
our solution and design should be designed for the market,
taking into consideration the technologies they use and are
familiar with, also their method of learning or taking in information.
3. Easy to Understand
information presented should be easily understood upon access.
There should be no indirect or underlying information, everything
should be direct and straight-to-the-point.
4. Increasing P2's Presence
the more people are aware of the P2 finder and its resources,
the more people would rely on it for pollution preventions.
5. Actively Use P2 Solutions
in return of its awareness, individuals would actively
rely and acutally apply the P2 solutions in their life.
6. Feedback Built in Database
from Image recognition, Geo tagging to simply providing data
of the effect of the user’s participation feedback is key
as it also provides comfort with the users.
7. Measures Engagement
point system only adds on to the competition.
8. Accessible on Different Platforms
Not get lost on the government website.
A Separate entity.
9. One-stop Shop
(less than 3 clicks from user).
ideation
Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go uses augmented reality for users to play the game while interacting
their surroundings. This makes users more active and willing to go outside as
all as collaborate with other app users to complete a challenge. Pokemon Go's
interactivity with one's surroundings inspired my team and I to also integrate
that into our solution.
Cineplex Time Play
TimePlay is an interactive gaming experience
that you play throughout the show before your movie. You could
win great prizes just for playing at any of the Cineplex theatres.
We liked the competitive yet fun aspect of this app and wanted to
incorporate a similar idea and feel when using our app.
Designing
We personally navigated through the P2 website and read the articles provided pollution prevention activities as well that we can possibly incorporate into the P2 app. We understand the market as WE are the market, we used our personal experiences (as students) and compared what pollution prevention choices we’ve made and continuously make we had Felix, our teammate and former don / student leader; share his experience living in a residence as a don and the influence he has, simply because he is a student lead.
We moved to the whiteboard and began brainstorming our design system and overall
design of our app solution:
We cleaned up our mess of a brainstorm, organized our thoughts and got a more
clear understanding of our idea:
I then started making rough designs for our UIs and app logo as we
determined our app name: Pulito, which is a direct Italian transalation of clean.
Solutions
1. Integrate Collaboration
Weekly competition between users, has a team and collaboration aspect.
2. Point System (-/+ for specific actions and uses)
Everyone likes a friendly competition, therefore adding a point system
would only increase excitement and use of the P2 finder app.
3. Target a Small Section of the ‘Youth’
It is easier to first target a small section of the youth that are established.
(in a facility, life in that specific point in time in their youth would have
to make independent decisions and choices. This app then can guide them to make
more pollution prevention choices).
Our targeted youth being university students, they are mostly in residences as
it pertains to the school environment as well.
4. Developing Good Habits among Users
These would enable users to accomplish good while
learning gradually through repeated use due to ease of use and friendly.
5. Ease of Accessibility is KEY
The P2 finder now is very cluttered as it has abundance of information,
it gives you many options and article that the most useful & reputable
sources are lost in the variety of information, by making the P2 finder
easier to read and navigate through (through our redesign) it would make
it more appealing to users.
RESULTS
Pulito encourages building a community of good doers of the environment.
This game-like, competitive app will have friends and family go head to
head in using less pollutant-based products.
Building a community of good-doers of the environment.
This is a mobile app holds weekly competition among groups of friends to see who used the least amount of plastic or pollutant-based products based on groceries bought.
Check your plastics so that it doesn't become problematic!
Its as easy as taking a selfie, but with your groceries! Using your cell-phone camera it will scan via barcode and identify products and its information to determine its type and scale of pollutant. The lower the amount of pollutant-based products bought the better!
Don't know the food item's packaging material? Search it up!
You can even search up each food item manually to determine its packaging material which would also determine your Pulito points based on the packaging material.
The pollution prevention finder is your friend!
Read more articles to learn how else you can reduce waste with grocery shopping or how to simply live a little-to-no waste lifestyle. Learning more about the products in your cart, via articles from the P2Finder’s database, educate the user of the environmental impacts but as well as compete in a game of knowledge: post-session quiz games between your friends and your team (and other app users) would make the app even more fun! They’re able to track their consumption and use of pollutants, being knowledgeable of their use and impacts especially with the help of P2 articles alike.
Teamwork makes the environmental impact work!
You can team up with your roomates and friends to collaborate and attempt to reduce as much waste as they can in their everday life, starting with groceries. This team effort can make waste-reductions fun and effective due to its friendly-competition. The more participation, the more pulito points, more waste is reduced!
Weekly waste-reducing challenges that you'd want to keep doing!
Easy and doable weekly challenges that would increase your Pulito points each completion! Each challenge is also followed by articles from P2Finder’s database. They get to share their achievements and learn their P2 ways of living through easy weekly task.
visual design
final thoughts
The EDC challenge was a very fun experience overall;
I’ve learned that we have many pollution preventions
options to choose from that can help make a difference
no matter how small they are. This design challenge
helped me understand and realize the many resources
we have available to us, it’s only a matter of its
ease of accessibility and legibility. No matter how
much information we’d like to include within our app
or we will be including when integrating P2.
Designing
Two words: Design Systems! Sometimes being in the thick
of the competition, you get lost in the challenge, designing
whatever “looks good” rather than what works best for the user.
When we began designing the app, I started to go haywire!
From the navigation bar to what kind of button it should
have or whether it should have an off shadow with the images,
pointless design thinking because I was really focused on how
it looked rather than its system. I ended up creating screens
that were not needed and did not pertain to our idea, the UIs
became inconsistent! We learned the importance of having a solid
design system to follow so that we do not forget any screens or
make unnecessary ones.
Next Steps
As we continuously create and innovate, we also continue to mindlessly make pollutive choices – we hope to integrate Pulito or something of a similar application and practice in our everyday lives soon. We hope to involve more stakeholders for research, testing and design phases as well as explore more design solutions to guarantee its use and reliability. We hope to expand our market from University or College Residence to families (at home challenges, family-based) and then to an industry of some sort such as competition between restaurants etc.
