Enabling users to make sustainable choices with ease
Project Overview
Problem Statement
Sometimes, people don’t know what to do with old items around their homes -- whether that's reusing or recycling them in responsible ways.
Goal Statement
The purpose of Toss It is to make it easier for people to reuse and recycle. By engaging younger audiences, Toss It can teach them more about healthy recycling and reusability habits.
Role
Visual Designer
Responsibilities
Visual Design and Branding
Prototyping
Project Duration
September 2022 - one week
Research, insights, & ideation
Given that this was a design challenge, our team of three designers—two UI designers and one UX designer— quickly came together to come up with a solution to use technology for sustainability. After much market research and pain points surrounding sustainability, we came up with two unique personas, which eventually helped us craft a mobile app that is environmentally focused, intuitive, engaging, and educational.
Our users
Diving into design
Early designs
After we hopped on calls to figure out how we wanted this app to help users, we quickly began ideating on initial designs that displayed the user journey: from login & welcome, to identifying an item and receiving recommendations, to successfully disposing or repurposing the item.
Once we completed our mid-fidelity wireframes, we than began ideating on UI elements such as font, color palette, and the overall look and feel of the app.
UI design: overall look & feel
To flesh out a theme for our app, we decided on blues and greens to give a fresh, engaging, and organic. Additionally, according to color psychology and what humans are generally used to, green invokes feelings of renewal, energy and nature, while blue brings feelings of stability and reliability. These feelings represent how we’d like our users to feel as they navigate and interact with the app. Below is a mood board that helped us create our brand image as well as the logo creation process and color palette.
Logo creation & branding
Our logo also had its own iterations: from sketch, to Procreate to Adobe Illustrator!
Final Designs
Once a user has logged onto or signed up in Toss It, depending on the item scanned or manually searched, the user can either reuse/recycle that item—which provides a list of recommendations— or dispose of the item—in which the app will provide instructions and disposal locations in the area.
Onboarding
Upon login or signup, the users are presented with onboarding screens to help orient them around app functionality and what to expect.
Reuse or recycle
In this scenario, the user is using the app’s camera to identify instructions for a glass bottle.
Once the app identifies the glass bottle using your phone’s camera, the app will display information and suggestions about how you can reuse it, such as making a decorative vase or using it to brew sun tea.
Disposal
In this scenario, the user is using the app’s search features to manually find instructions for reuse, recycling, or disposal.
For used items that cannot be reused, like batteries, the app will tell the user to find the nearest disposal/recycling center and provide directions to get there.
Takeaways
Similar to the IBM Spark Design challenge, my team was not given much time to come up with an app, so it really challenged us to accomplish what we could with just three members. The actual exploration-to-delivery process took about a week and some change, and because of our already-existing work obligations, some Jam work had to be done late at night. Still, we came up with a great app albeit with some design-related issues to work through and successfully became one of 10 finalists out of many participants. (What's more, quite a few of our Atlanta designers made it as finalists! 🎉)
My tasks and contributions to this design challenge include:
Helped create Toss It!'s brand style guide
Created the Toss It! brand logo
Collaborated with two other designers: one Visual Designer and a UX Designer
Created high-fidelity prototypes with Adobe XD and animations within the prototype
Presented our final high-fidelity prototype to judges: IBM Design Leaders as well as a Design leader from Adobe
Thank you so much for reading.
Let’s work together to take care of the beautiful world we live in!