ScanCycle is a community iOS app designed to address the recycling problem through means of further education, incentives, and community enhancement.
Waste: Less than 9% of all plastics are recycled globally. Is there a way you and your team can come up with an idea to increase the recycling rate of plastics, whether in the USA or elsewhere?
While performing research on recycling, we learned that there is a huge need to increase the recycling percentage above 10%.
We plan to address the recycling problem by educating, incentivizing, and building community to help users become aware and motivated to recycle more efficiently. During the design process, some of the pillars that guided us included:
[Community] How might we develop the app's community-building features to foster collaboration and support among users?
- Our application utilizes map functionality to aid users as a community to find proper recycling bins. When users find a recycle bin they can register it into the community app where other users can find the closest recycling bin near them.
- Our app also builds communities by promoting various recycling events that users can attend with friends. By attending these events, users can build a community with those around them who also want to learn more about recycling.
[Rewards/Incentive] How might we integrate gamification elements to incentivize and motivate users to recycle consistently?
- Our application prototype applies gamification to encourage users by giving them an incentive and a fun experience while recycling and learning more about recycling.
[Educate] How might we educate users more about proper recycling behaviors?
- Our application prototype utilizes the camera app to scan items and inform users how to properly recycle the item, if there is food residue that would force the recycling batch to be thrown in the trash, and upload public recycling bins to inform the community.
Competitive Analysis
While creating, we wanted to perform competitive analysis to learn how this problem was already addressed and see if there's any interlap, also to see what problem's still persist that we could address. As we had five members, we split the competitive analysis with two designers performing a web competitive analysis and three designers performing an iOS competitive analysis.
Created an empathy map to combine the survey notes and decipher how the user feels about recycling.
After gathering survey highlights, I consolidated each sticky note to find common themes and figure out how we could solve problems with our app.
Wanted to utilize my background in IA as we had a tight timeline and wanted to prioritize which features are necessary. Also was helpful to delegate screens/features to each member during the week.
We wanted to focus on three pillars: Education, Community, and Rewards
If given more time, we would love to:
- Broad research scope leaning towards recycling
- Time constraint limited further research
- Invalidated assumption about lack of recycling efforts
