Sharewaste
Mobile app redesign
Overview
ShareWaste is a company that connects people in communities who are passionate about composting.
To divert waste from the landfill, Donors find Hosts and use the app to contribute their food scraps to an existing compost pile.
The current ShareWaste app although minimalistic in appearance has functionality issues and user roadblocks.
My role and impact
In the role as a Lead Visual Interaction Designer on this team, I collaborated with our researcher on discovering usability issues through testing and came up with intuitive and elegant solutions to users’ problems. My visual design skills were crucial in developing this solution and the improved usability score.
Key Contributions: user testing, ideation and visual design, animation, and interaction.
Team
Two designers
Duration
3 Months (2020)
Software
Figma, Ilustrator,
Photoshop
The problem
While there is a solid service that functions with the app, first-time users are having trouble navigating through the interface — finding the Map and then the Hosts.
There is unclear terminology used. For example, Donors are people who donate food scraps to a Host’s pile, and the main CTA on the page is Donate, which takes the users to a monetary donation page.
Defining the scope
After a preliminary research and market analysis, we defined our scope to:
1) Create an intuitive user experience
2) Eliminate users’ roadblocks to achieve a seamless flow
3) Rebrand the app while keeping a minimalistic but contemporary look
Heuristic Analysis was later confirmed by user testing
To kick start this project I performed a Heuristic Analysis based on Nielsen Norman’s ten heuristic principles.
I looked at other competitors and created a Comparative Analysis.
Repetitive user testing was the basis for our design decisions
User testing revealed few roadblocks and pain point. After we conducted moderated user testing with a mockup of the current ShareWaste app, and observed the paths that users took, we created a questionnaire through which we measured a few different metrics, like Task success score, Net promoter score, and Emotional tracking.
Current ShareWaste app
The proposed solution showed improved user experience
Based on the insights we learned from the first round of testing I created a greyscale prototype that included a new onboarding flow with micro animations, sign-up screens, a new home page with quick links, an improved map functionality, and a list of nearby Composters. The prototype was then tested again, which showed an already improved user experience.
First Prototype
How did the ShareWaste app did against the new solution?
Below are summarized results of both user studies, where we compared the experience of the current ShareWaste app to the new solution in Prototype 1.
Color, UI, motion and micro-interactions
After synthesizing the second usability test results and eliminating major roadblocks, we spent a good amount of time working on micro-interactions, perfecting the UI elements and the overall visual flow of the app.