What is CleanWave?
CleanWave's mission is to foster increased awareness about the significance of safeguarding our marine life and coastal ecosystems, while also nurturing a sense of community and fostering friendly competition among its users during coastal cleanup events through a mobile app and responsive website.
Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer
Time: 2 Weeks
Responsibilities: Conducting interviews, user studies, developing paper and digital wireframes, both the low and high-fidelity prototypes, managing accessibility, design iterations, and creating the responsive layouts.
The Problem
Current beach and ocean environmental cleanup organizations are too decentralized to provide global solutions for organizing and promoting cleanup efforts accessible for a range of ages, languages, and physical limitations.
The Goal
CleanWave's goal is to provide a cohesive platform that seamlessly integrates the features of a user-friendly mobile app, educational resources, and gamified challenges to encourage participation in coastal cleanup activities. By combining incentives, social recognition, education, and competition CleanWave empowers users to make a tangible difference in preserving the planet's oceans and coastlines.
The User Research
In order to understand the needs and wants of users who were looking for a environmentally conscious community and social network, I conducted surveys, interviews, and several iterations of usability testing.
Research showed users were looking for a platform with accurate information, education resources, and also a user-friendly environment with with search filters for languages, ages, and physical limitations.
Personas
Competitive Audit
The audit helped establish user's typical goals and known pain points when involved in coastal cleanup initiatives. Such goals included seeking information on cleanup events, resources and guides for organizing their own activities, and the desire to connect with like-minded individuals and organizations working toward coastal conservation.
Ideation
Before sketching I laid out a sitemap for CleanWave. When organizing the information architecture of the website I choose to go with a hierarchical structure. Users are already familiar with this type of website layout and this structure integrated well with the purpose of the website.
With the user goals in mind I worked on some quick ideation sketches. My main focus was on any primary functions the user would want access to when participating in coastal cleanup events.
Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes
After sketching the paper wireframes, I created low-fidelity mockups and prototypes in Adobe XD. This helped to organize the information to create the best experience for the user.
Usability studies were conducted using the low-fidelity prototype. Affinity mapping the users pain points led to adding additional search filters.
High-Fidelity Prototype
This expanded on the main user journey of either joining a cleanup even or creating their own but still kept the steps to a minimum.
Preview Desktop Prototype
Preview Mobile Prototype
Takeaways
Impact:
Users shared they like that CleanWave incorporated community involvement and a reward system to encourage participation. "The rewards and incentives are a great way to keep me engaged. I like the idea of trading in points for rewards."
What I learned:
This UX project, even if it is a fictional project for a portfolio, taught me that ideas for social good may be complicated and time-consuming but they can be the most rewarding. Creating actionable solutions that could positively impact the real world if implemented required extensive research and empathic understanding of the target audience.
