Which of these items can you recycle?
Did you have to guess? It's O.K. There's a lot of people guessing when it comes to sorting their waste. In fact, UMN college students sorted with a 23% rate of error. We decided to find out why.
Problem:
In 2019, the University of Minnesota produced 7,775.8 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) (2022). The university reported that 40% of this was recycled or composted, which is only 7.0% higher than the national diversion rate (2021). These staggering numbers highlight that there is still work to be done to decrease the amount of waste, and thus the amount of greenhouse gasses our community creates.
The focus of this research is waste separation behavior and how to increase the diversion rate by eliminating user error.
Context
create a UI that helps busy college students corretly sort their waste in order to improve the university’s diversion rate?
User surverys
User surveys consisted of 8 participants who responded to a series of prompts in order to test the identified hypothesis. These users indicated that sustainability was highly important to them, yet reported that they had only moderately environmentally friendly lifestyles. To find out why consumers might not behave environmentally, the survey asked participants to self-identify what keeps them from sorting their post-consumer products. More than half of the participants responded that they do not know where products go, while users also identified they do not trust their sorted items will actually be recycled upon collection. The time it took to sort was also a barrier.
1. Users indicated that sustainability was highly important to them.
2. 62% of users indicated they were highly confident of their sorting abilities
2. Yet 62% also indicated that they’re unsure of where to put things.
Recycling Simulation
Task: Users were presented with 13 random objects to be sorted by dragging them to the appropriate receptacle.
Color Sorting
I wondered if the problem of incorrect disposal occured in users' mental models. What if the solution weas as simple as changing the color of the bin lids?
Task: Users were presented with 11 different colors with seven words. They were asked to put the assign a color to the word based on their emotional perception.
Findings
Users generall categorized colors similarly. All users selected light green for sustainaiblity. This data gives us insite in to potential redesign for the current bin solutions on campus.
Inital Prototypes and Development
Key Findings from User Research
4 concept prototypes:
Gamification:
1. Scan product
2. Each product helps hatch or care for pet duck
3. Tamagotchi inspired
Scanning:
1. Scan product by barcode
2. Scan product by material
3. Get points for scanning
4. Leaderboard/Impact Report
Physical Product:
1. Scan by material or barcode at sorting site
2. Instructs you were to put item
3. Tracks all time impact at each site
Incentivization
1. Scan product by material
2. Get points for products
3. More points for recycle/compost
4. Trade in for money
User Testing
My classmate and I interviewed 10 participants to test each concept and determine likes, dislikes and usability. We used a standardized testing procedure with the use of a script and required users to complete the same taks for every prototype. Here were the results:
1st Iteration Mockup
Flexibility and Usability
User research suggested that the interface should do most of the thinking for the user. Since the application is a decision support system, further designs prioritize buttons that are indicative of its interaction and to make interactive components obvious (Proctor & Zandt, 2008). To allow for effective dialogue between the user and the computer, an alert was added to the interface (Proctor & Zandt, 2008). When the scanned object is detected the alert prompts the user to confirm its accuracy, allowing flexibility for the user to change their input if desired. Promoting accurate usability, the new design incorporated scanning for material and barcode into one feature, resolving the issue of users not knowing to flip between tabs to scan by material versus barcode.
Lessons Learned
After reflecting again on user research I remembered that students were not paying attention to current visual queues (no fault here, students are busy). I decided to rebrand the app and re-design the physical waste bins with correlating visual queues to further encourage approprate user behavior.
Quick Mock-up of redesign:
