A holistic solution to enhance students' recycling practices on campus keeping in mind their intrinsic motivation
In the United States, improper recycling practices represent a major issue. Although there have been initiatives to encourage recycling, students frequently engage in incorrect recycling behaviors, which results in a large volume of waste being diverted to landfills. Proper recycling of materials such as paper, metal, cardboard, and plastic has the potential to cut landfill waste in half. Therefore, addressing the challenges related to recycling is more important than ever.
This project aims to identify the underlying reasons for improper recycling habits and to create strategies and solutions that foster effective recycling practices among students.
Students of Indiana University
We suggest a comprehensive approach that includes:
Our solution aims to clear up confusion and ignorance regarding waste management and foster intrinsic motivation among users.
Studies show that 94% of Americans are in favor of recycling, with 74% believing it should be a high priority. However, only around 35% actively participate in recycling. The main reason for this low participation rate is the lack of knowledge and awareness among Americans.
According to the NYPost, "more than half of Americans are not very sure of what to recycle." In a survey of about 2,000 Americans, 62% admitted they might be recycling incorrectly due to insufficient knowledge.
To gain deeper insights into user behavior, we observed students disposing of waste around the campus, particularly near the dining hall, cafeteria, and library. We observed that students often discarded recyclable and reusable items into landfill bins and placed unclean recyclable materials into the recycling bin.
Our team conducted eight student interviews. The results revealed a common theme of confusion and frustration among students regarding waste disposal. Specifically, they expressed confusion about how to properly dispose of waste and frustration with unclear instructions. Additionally, three of the interviewees highlighted their unawareness of the impact of recycling, which they felt contributed to their apathy towards proper recycling practices.
The Affinity Diagram was used to gather and organize insights from interviews, observations, and research, providing a comprehensive view of the issue and allowing for the creation of a problem statement. This method helped identify relationships and patterns within the data.
To gain insights and develop empathy for our user group prior to creating a user persona, we utilized an Empathy Map. This tool helped us prioritize the needs of our users. The data collected from actual users was then used to construct the user persona.
In our research progression, we developed a user persona to expand upon the insights gathered in the empathy map, transforming them into detailed descriptions of user types. This persona helped center our design process around the user, fostering empathy for their needs, goals, and behaviors.
How might we design for busy university students to eliminate their confusion and encourage them to recycle properly and consistently, while taking into account their need for convenience?
To address the challenge of guiding busy university students towards consistent recycling while prioritizing convenience, we initially brainstormed a multitude of ideas, disregarding feasibility at this stage. Each team member contributed individually before consolidating ideas as a group. These concepts were evaluated based on their potential value to users and the business, as well as technical feasibility, using a Mind Map to visualize our ideation process.
We recognized that redesigning recycling bin illustrations could significantly reduce confusion about trash disposal at a low cost and rapid pace, also serving as a gateway for our Mobile Application.
Strategically positioned in high-traffic areas frequented by students, our newly designed poster engaged students and clarified recycling procedures, as observed during our monitoring sessions. Follow-up surveys with students confirmed the poster's effectiveness, noting its clear, visually appealing illustrations.
Each team member independently applied Nielsen's ten usability heuristics to our wireframe designs, identifying four major usability issues with severity ratings of 3-4. We addressed these issues with actionable improvements as we proceeded to Usability Testing. Below is an example excerpt from our Usability Aspect Report detailing one identified issue:
Our team conducted usability tests with five users for the mobile application, assigning specific tasks to gauge product usability. We monitored user interactions closely during task completion:
Three participants expressed enthusiasm for community engagement, though one was hesitant pending interest in events, and another was less inclined towards membership. These insights highlight areas for enhancing community appeal.
The mobile app's home screen prominently features all its functionalities, with an emphasis on community engagement to foster collaborative problem-solving.
A floating Item Scanner button facilitates quick access for users to scan items for recycling details.
Members are presented with the following screen after login. Members can view the events that are planned by the Recycling Club and can register to the event they are interested in.
The screen also shows statistics of the impact that the club has created. This helps the members to feel motivated.
Members can also vote for the upcoming events. The poll is created by an admin.
Part of my process is to analyze at the end how the project went about and dissect the processes to look for opportunities for improvement. As a surgeon dissects a body after death to understand what went wrong, I feel it is important for a UX professional to do the same at the end of every project/ cycle, i.e. to do a Post-Mortem.
I believe that the following are some areas that we could have done better as a team:
Having experience only in UX research before this project was the first Design project that I worked on. Few personal learnings I had from this project were:
Moving forward, we expect that these solutions can be tested in other universities for further refinement. The scope of this application can be further improved by executing the following ideas:
