BLUE DOT
User Experience Design project. An AR app that helps us taking care of our spaceship. Our mother. Our home.
My role
User Experience Designer and Project Manager.
How was the
process like?
Research driven project to explore the possibilities of AR as data visualization.
Who is our user?
Anyone with an interest in exploring and adding new environmentally friendly habits into their daily routine.
Outcome
Blue Dot will be realeased in early June 2020 in iOS and Android.
Why Blue Dot?
Blue Dot project starts with the need to find user-friendly solutions to help citizens acquire more environmentally-friendly habits.
Currently, we are producing more CO2 in the atmosphere than any other time in human history. The Earth will lose its self-regeneration ability in 2030. And 120,000 square kilometers of tropical forest were lost in 2018. Dozens of species go extinct every single day. Our oceans are dying at an unprecedented speed rate. What can we do, as citizens, in our lives to make an impact?
I wanted to explore how can technology help us create new habits to help the environment. In a moment where fitness, productivity, and habit creation apps that track your improvements are attracting millions of users, I wonder why we don't apply these principles to help our environment.
Research Goal
To start the research I needed to understand habit creation, and why some habits no matter how hard we try do not stick with us. Especially I was interested in analyzing why some simple environmentally friendly habits, (such as recycling, composting, reusing, etc) are so hard to incorporate in our daily life.
How can we help people in their daily life keeping track of and achieve their environmental goals?
In order to gain qualitative insight into this topic, I interviewed 20 individuals aged 20-40 that are worried about the environment but struggle to add simple habits to improve their environmental footprint.
You can see some of my research findings in the graphic below.
“We need millions of people practicing environmentalism imperfectly instead of only a handful of hardcore vegans doing it right” Anna O.
“Doing the right things for the environment takes so much time and effort that started to feel like something elitist, only achievable if you have time or money to spare” Hector N.
Persona
Laura, 27 - Online Marketing Assistant - Lives in New York with her partner.
Laura lives in Bushwick and loves to host parties. Her work is very demanding and has no free time to improvise. She is very active on social media and recently has been trying to adopt a zero-waste lifestyle... but keeps failing at it.
Frustrations
Laura doesn’t have any close friends with her same views on environmentalism. She doesn’t have time to stop at zero waste shops. New habits don’t stick because she doesn’t have a routine. Often feels that all her efforts are useless.
Goals
She wants to make a difference and because of that she needs to stick to new habits.
Our persona needs to find a way to stick with environmentally friendly habits because she is frustrated with her current lack of motivation/information.
Our Primary User goal is helping the user to create habits and keep track of the milestones.
User Flow
In Blue Dot, I explored a user flow inspired in different habit creating, fitness, diet, and tracking apps. With features and flow reflected in the following list:
Login
Complete little survey
Get personalized plan of habits
Join a weekly challenge
During the day mark daily habits as done
Visualize your accomplishments
Get rewards or sponsorships
Add new habits to your list
The AR Component
AR has proven over the last 5 years to be an extremely efficient tool for data visualization. The fact the user can see his or her contributions in real-time is extremely helpful. Being able to see the real impact of your decisions in a tangible way it's a key factor to increase motivation.
A person who is starting diet and exercise can start seeing tangible results in only a few weeks. If they weren't able to track their improvement the motivation for keeping up with the effort will start to decline soon. In the same way the efforts that conscious citizens put into creating more environmentally friendly habits tend to be invisible. Do you know how much CO2 you saved this year? How much you reduced your water footprint this month? How many plastic bottles did you save from landfills in the past decade?
Imagine you could see in AR all this data and compare it or share it on your social media. Because when the users feel that they are doing a good job it's more likely that they will stick to the new positive habits.
I will continue researching this area of data visualization and habit creating more in-depth in the near future to have more conclusive evidence.
Low Fidelity Sketches
Wireframes
Wireframes were done in Sketch and illustrations in Procreate.
