Crafting a Playful Digital Experience to Raise Awareness about Our Daily Bio-Waste Management

Context: Project for 2-week Sound Design Course
Team: Amanda Wallgren, Yuan Hong, Anuja Tripathi
My Role: UX/ UI Design, Motion Design, Storytelling Video

Although we know that we should not waste food, we still find it challenging to change our behavior. Why is that? One of the reasons is that we lack feedback, making it hard to realize the consequences of our actions.

ecora leverages auditory and visual feedback to help users better manage their food waste at home. The aim is to influence users' behavior towards reducing food waste and nudging them towards a more sustainable food lifestyle.

Design Outcome

ecora product ecosystem
ecora includes a physical product—a smart bio-bin, and a digital product—an app connected with the physical bio-bin to collect the bio-waste data, providing feedback and suggestions.

ecora app- set weekly food waste goal
Through the ecora app, users can set new weekly goals based on their previous week's waste amount. By integrating a gamified experience, just like eliminating block puzzle, we aim to transform the food waste management into a playful journey, making the process more engaging and enjoyable.

ecora app- weekly "sound aura" report
Based on the data collected from the bio-bin, the ecora app will generate a summary of the user's personal weekly waste, displayed in a dynamic "sound aura" on the screen. Through the use of color, motion, and sound on the aura, it provides an overview of users' behavior in a playful way, avoiding overwhelming them with detailed static numbers.

ecora app- tips collection
ecora provides users with practicle recommendations and tips to reuse or reduce food waste. These small tips assist users in making smarter decisions regarding bio-waste management in their household, promoting a more sustainable and eco-friendly approach.

Design Process

Overview of the project process
This is a two-week sprint project. Considering the time limit, during the design process, we mainly focus on quick design ideation, prototyping, and implementation.

1️⃣ Quick ideation & Draft Prototyping

2️⃣ Digital design ideation & wireframe

3️⃣ Wizard-of-oz prototyping to test the experience

4️⃣ Final Interface Design and Prototype

Design Chllenge Highlight‍

🤔 Behavior change is a gradual, long-term journey. How might we elevate the experience of the behaviour change process, to make this process more enjoyable?

🤔 Food waste is not a new topic. A lot of people already get tired of the educational cliche. How might we approach this topic dynamically and playfully?

What we did?

Visualized the behaviour change process to make it more tangible
Gamified Experience to craft playful micro-interaction, creating an engaging user journey
Leveraged the hardware touchpoint- physical bio-bin to detect food waste, classify different food waste types, and encourage users to manage their food waste towards a more sustainable way.

Learning & Take Away

‍👀 Crafting micro-interaction design & Embracing the minimal fun part in digital interface design
During the interface design process, I focused on making the experience more playful through fun micro-interactions, exploring more possibilities for simple interactions. With the current digital product design in the industry, I feel designers are always forming certain design language for specific tasks. The process of designing an interface becomes more and more efficient, but it lacks the fun and unexpected parts. By exploring different forms of interaction, I believe there are more possibilities to shift the experience from being efficient to use towards being enjoyable to use.

🛠️ Building digital prototype to test the feeling of the interface design
Prototyping for digital interfaces has always been less prioritized in the design process, and usually, it is being used mainly for testing the product workflow. However, a high-fidelity digital prototype with motion is also helpful for testing the feeling of the interface, similar to a physical product.