Case study
Designing experiences to improve carbon literacy
Context
I joined Cogo as the first full time product designer while the company was shifting its main model from B2C to B2B2C, in an effort to create impact at scale and a viable business. Cogo was founded in 2010 and had explored many ways to change consumer spending for good, but was now focused on helping individuals and businesses measure, understand, and reduce their impact on the climate.
Cogo’s original product was a B2C mobile app, into which a spend-based carbon footprint tracker feature had been built as a proof of concept. Cogo was now selling an API for banks to integrate carbon management features like this into their digital experiences. This way, Cogo could meet individuals in a space they are already engaged with, reaching a broader audience, removing blockers to building carbon literacy, and enabling climate action.
I led a project in Cogo’s R&D team to refine and validate how spend-based carbon footprint estimates could be used to improve carbon literacy.
Discovery
I started with an analysis of Cogo's direct and indirect competitors, as well as other sources of inspiration, gathering submissions and thoughts from the team. I also reviewed the UX of the proof of concept in the mobile app and any user feedback and previous research to find relevant insights. Alongside this, a behaviour scientist on our team undertook a literature review.
Key findings
Benchmarks or other comparisons were common ways to help users understand whether their footprint is 'good or bad', however can be demotivating if too generic
Equivalencies are often used to make footprints less abstract, these are best when relatable to the user, rather than just another big number that's hard to visualise
Equivalencies should not be used when referring to offsets, as it could de-incentivise taking actions
Finding ways to reduce emissions felt disconnected from the experience of exploring carbon footprint categories and history for all competitors
Visual scale can be used effectively to compare alternatives
Using traffic light colours can encourage low carbon purchases
It's important to show credible sources and explain how things work to build enough trust in the data for decision making
Terminology is often complex and differing across competitors, being consistent and using simple language can improve understanding
Ideation
With our findings from discovery, we formed hypotheses of ways we could improve the experience and help the users with this Job To Be Done:
When I'm concerned about climate change
I want to find out what my carbon footprint is, and identify ways reduce it
So I can be confident in taking meaningful action
Hypotheses
We believe showing spending data enriched with a carbon footprint can improve carbon literacy by helping users understand the impact of different behaviours
We believe that visualising footprints (using scale and traffic light colours) can improve carbon literacy by helping users compare impact
I started designing some concepts we could quickly get in front of people to help test our hypotheses, and the usability of seeing carbon footprint estimates alongside bank transactions. After a couple of rounds of team feedback and iteration, I narrowed it down to a final prototype.
Validating solutions
I paired with the UX researcher in the team to plan the user testing sessions and craft an interview script. We ran 7 sessions, with different members of the team able to facilitate and take notes from our instructions. I then used affinity mapping and the atomic research model to summarise our findings into insights and recommendations.
Our findings supported our hypotheses, the prototype helping users understand the potential scale of a personal footprint and the difference in impact between the categories and transactions contributing to it.
“It's quite a nice visual idea of where things sit, I'm quite surprised that public transport is so low, because I'd think trains would use a lot of energy but I guess if everyone's using them...”
“Stuff I Buy causes carbon as well. Yeah that's pretty cool, there are things in there that you just don't think about.”
In the interviews before seeing the designs, some users had underestimated the likely footprint of a spend, and others spoke of being unsure if their efforts to reduce emissions were impactful. Generally users found the prototype easy to use, the information useful, and had positive reactions, some speaking to how it could help them to change.
“Obviously seeing a percentage very clearly indicates which [category] is causing the biggest impact so you could limit that from a very easy first view of, you know, almost 50% of my carbon footprint is just me moving around"
“You can see that if I were to fly on holiday I can see how it would be a lot worse”
Other members of the team collaborated with CogCo to conduct a quantitative study to further validate our hypotheses. The online experiment with 1,003 UK participants found that showing carbon footprints on transactions, along with the ‘spectrum’ visualisations to compare different options within a category, increased carbon literacy (measured by testing knowledge, confidence and motivation) by up to 8%.
Applying learnings
We wanted to apply what we’d learnt to the mobile app, which we’d repurposed as a tool for R&D, to see how people responded to our solutions when it used their personal data instead of the fictional spending we mocked up for the prototype. This gave us the opportunity to iterate on the designs, consider edge cases, and understand what the API should provide to enable banks to replicate the experience.
I designed a new transaction feed feature for the app, simulating a common mobile banking experience. This allowed users to understand the impact of their more recent spending decisions that are fresh in memory. I applied the traffic light colour system to this feed to find out if it would help users identify their high and low carbon spending.
Transactions with a lower carbon alternative within the same spending category were flagged with a red message, including an estimate of how much carbon could’ve been saved. Transactions where the user had made an environmentally friendly choice were flagged with green messages as positive feedback. By opening the dropdowns on these messages, users could compare the footprint of their purchase to alternatives with the ‘spectrum’ visualisation. I had an interesting design challenge to link this experience to the related climate actions screens, to allow users to learn more about an action or let us know if they were already doing it.
I ran another round of user testing with a Figma prototype to check the usability of the new feature, get any initial insights, and help ensure it was worthwhile building, before speccing it up for development.
"Learnt how significantly higher buying fuel is compared to public transport. Know there's a difference, but not how dramatic it is. Sometimes we choose convenience over doing our part. Would make me think twice."
"Really like the bit about transactions. TFL bit [positive feedback for taking public transport] - love that. Conscious about 'doing bit for today'"
"I'm trying to do more second hand fashion instead of fast fashion because you don't realise the impact until you see like figures like that"
"Would have been good to have source to explain how these numbers are calculated"
I paired with engineers to quickly address any missed edge cases, and once the feature was in staging, checked it for design QA before it was released. Our UX researcher then gathered further insights from the regular cadence of user interviews she ran to understand how each update was (or weren’t) working in the wild.
Key findings
Footprint comparisons continue to be effective to help users understand the impact of different spending behaviours and how to take action. Continue to use this approach with iteration to make information memorable and easy to absorb quickly.
People appreciate positive feedback acknowledging their efforts, and seeing the impact of taking action helps reinforce behaviour. They’d like more recognition of their efforts, and visibility of their progress on their sustainability journey.
Users are in the dark about how the impact of their spending is calculated, and want to know more, especially when confronted with high footprints. This lack of understanding can cause mistrust and disengagement, and make it difficult to determine whether to change behaviour.
High footprints and ways to reduce emissions are likely to be better received when framed informatively and as opportunities, rather than negative feedback or “telling off”.
Outcome
Taking what we learnt from the R&D app, I iterated on the designs and envisioned them in a mobile banking context. I also wrote up UX guidelines from our findings, adding them to a handbook I created to help our banking clients build carbon management features into their digital customer experiences.
