Earth Hero Community Feature
Designing a Community Feature to allow users of the Earth Hero app to collaborate on actions promoting sustainability
My Roles
UX Design
Prototyping
Presentation
Timeline
June – August 2022
Tools
Figma
David Oostenbrug
Kasey Ostronic
Aline Carbonaro
Cristina Lutcan
Fernanda Feres
Team
Climate Change is a problem too big to solve alone
The Challenge
Earth Hero users cannot work together. The lack of features allowing users of the Earth Hero app to connect with each other limits their ability to collaborate on their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
The Solution
A Community feature for Earth Hero allowing users to interact and share goals and motivation; mobilizing users to increased levels of environmental action and advocacy.
How might we promote inter-user engagement to foster collaboration on shared goals?
I worked with a team of six UX designers along with a larger team of researchers and project strategists from Tech Fleet to help address the Earth Hero app’s issue with a lack of community interaction.
Using insight gained from our project’s research team, I designed task flows for the creation of a group within the Earth Hero App
This task flow helped delineate actions taken and screens seen only by group admin and those accessible to all users
The Earth Hero design system facilitated screen ideation and the creation of our first prototype
Initial Screen Sketch
Prototype Screen
User testing of our prototype pointed out the need to clarify required information and the structuring of information gathering in the group creation process
Final Prototype for Group Creation
“It’s more fun when I’m not working alone.”
– Earth Hero User
Mock-up of Group Main Page
User research showed increased app engagement when users were able to interact with other users of the app. Our second task was to develop the methods of user interaction within a group.
Our team developed a Group Feed to display individual and group achievements and to allow users to interact within their group
As chat functionality was out of scope for our MVP, I implemented a activity timeline and emoji response feature similar to that used by Slack to allow for user interaction
The final prototype of the Group Feature allowed for group goal setting, progress tracking of sustainability goals, and an activity feed with interactive posts
Group Creation and Goal Setting screens
Progress Tracking and Action Feed screens
“The Tech Fleet team did a fantastic job creating the community feature MVP. The design team, in particular, came up with a tremendous user-centered approach grounded in design principles, research, and strategy. They ensured the design was aligned with the Earth Hero brand and voice so that this new feature would be a natural extension of the current product.”
— Ben Gerhold, President Of The Board Of Directors of Earth Hero
Lessons Learned
Having the Earth Hero design system already in place greatly facilitated our team‘s ability to produce consistent design for our Community feature.
Having clear design rules already considered freed us to more easily focus on content and user experience.
Design systems are a force multiplier
Even with weekly Sprint Recap Meetings with our entire project team, it was clear that the level of inter-team engagement was not enough.
Our Design Team relied on the Strategy Team to determine what functions were in or out of scope for our MVP and on the Research Team to provide user feedback on our designs. We often could not continue our work without communication from both of these teams and ended up delegating members of our team to be representatives at the other teams‘ meetings.
I was the delegate to the Strategy Team and these sources of constant connection were vital to ensuring our work kept on track and was not delayed by information lag or deviated from our intended goals.
Inter-team communication is key!
My team thought of multiple additions to our designs that could improve the clarity of the information within the group feature or facilitate interactions between users. The danger of scope creep was very real.
While this ideation process was important and helped facilitate the creation of design solutions, when unbound, it also led to hours of work spent on concepts that would never make it into our design.
I found it very important to remember the scope constraints limiting our project and that a project can be successful even if it does not incorporate all the potential that a team has imagined.
“Complete” does not equal “perfect”
Next Steps
Hopefully, our designs will help the Earth Hero team finalize and launch their community feature!
If I continued to work on the project, I would advocate for the inclusion of a chat feature ASAP, as this feature was the most highly requested by user testers.