CIRKULAR
Re-Defining Sustainable Online Shopping
Cirkular is a bold and innovative plug-in designed to combat overconsumption in e-commerce by empowering users to shop consciously while redefining the secondhand experience. Through an advanced reverse image search method, users are recommended high-quality secondhand alternatives to fast fashion trends with ease. By blending technology, sustainability, and design, the platform inspires users to revamp their shopping habits and rethink the value of secondhand to offset their carbon footprint.
August 2024 - Ongoing
Project Timeline
Project Lead, User Interface and Experience Designer, Prototyper, Researcher
Role
End-to-End UX/UI Design Project
Project Type
Figma, UX Research, Market Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Presentation Delivery, Cross-team Collaboration
My Impact
The climate crisis is accelerating at an alarming pace, requiring immediate, comprehensive action. However, many existing solutions focus primarily on top-down strategies, such as government policies and technological advancements, while overlooking the significant influence of individual consumer behavior. This gap is particularly troubling, considering that household consumption accounts for 60-70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Problem
How might we implement a just-in-time product or resource that educates users about their impact on the climate and encourages users to make concrete changes in their consumption habits with the end goal of zero carbon emissions in the next 10 years?
Transportation: The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is increasing, spurred by government incentives. The EU’s goal to ban new gasoline cars underscores this shift. There has also been proposed expansions to the United States’ public transportation under President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.
Food Consumption: Initiatives promoting plant-based diets, such as the EAT-Lancet Commission, encourages diets rich in plants, while companies like Beyond Meat offer plant-based meat alternatives, significantly reducing emissions compared to traditional meat.
Home Energy Use: Smart Home Energy Management Systems (SHEMS) optimize energy with automation and recommendations, helping US households reduce waste. Barrio Electrico in Puerto Rico and Zuwa Energy in Malawi make renewable energy more accessible.
Consumer Goods and Services: Efforts to promote sustainability in this sector include carbon labeling, which provide information on the environmental impact of products, and sustainable product certification that assure consumers of a product’s environmental and social responsibility.
Market Research and
Existing Solutions
Behavioral Economics: Implementing nudges, such as subtle changes in how options are presented, can guide decisions without restricting freedom- such as sustainability as a default.
Sustainability Studies and Environmental Science: Life cycle assessments (LCA) evaluate the environmental impact of products throughout their life cycle, helping inform consumers about the true cost of their choices.
HCI: Incorporating gamification elements, personalized recommendations, and clear, engaging storytelling can encourage more eco-friendly choices.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Transparency and authenticity are vital. Sustainability report and ensuring ethical supply chains builds trust and accountability with consumers and stakeholders.
Ethical Considerations in Design Interventions: Design interventions must prioritize transparency and user control, ensuring users are informed about how their data are used.
Competitor Analysis
Drawing from our insights in our literature review, we crafted a survey that explored several key areas: assessing concern, personal responsibility, and willingness to adopt sustainable behaviors. Additionally, we identified where consumers obtained their climate information and their awareness to preexisting initiatives and obstacles in the fight against climate change, providing a comprehensive view of consumer attitudes and behaviors.
Respondent Demographics: 80% (24) of respondents were between 18 and 24 6.7% (2) of respondents were between 25 and 24 10% (3) of respondents were between 35 and 64 6.7% (2) of respondents were over 65 Respondents were from all over the world, with the largest portion from New York State, USA (44%).
User Interviews
The concern for climate change suggests a favorable environment for encouraging sustainable consumption. Interventions should prioritize behaviors with higher acceptance, such as thrifting, while addressing more challenging changes such as meat consumption. Leveraging social media and personal networks can be highly effective channels for information dissemination and influence. There is a clear need to improve awareness of existing climate change initiatives and advocate for more infrastructural changes. Transparency and authenticity are vital. Sustainability report and ensuring ethical supply chains builds trust and accountability with consumers and stakeholders. Appealing to consumers’ moral identity and aligning sustainable products with their personal values can increase adoption.
Our Insights
Significant Concern for Climate Change: Survey revealed a significant level of concern for climate change, an average level of 3.9 out of 5. 90% of respondents rated their concern as 3 or higher.
Varied Willingness to Adopt Sustainability: 47% of respondents willing to reduce meat consumption. 70% of respondents willing to buy secondhand. 73% interested in reducing household energy consumption.
Social Media is the Primary Source of Information: The primary source of climate information (43%) came from social media. 43% of participants reported discussing climate change with family and friends.
Limited Awareness of Specific Climate Initiatives: Participants demonstrated limited knowledge of specific climate initiatives, mentioning general actions rather than targeted programs. Belief in Individual Action: The importance of individual action was highly rated by all ages, with an average of 4.1 out of 5. Notably 90% of participants scored belief in personal responsibility at 4 or higher.
Survey Results
Research
Strategies to Inspire
Sustainability Psych
Curated Platforms and Marketplaces: Platforms like DoneGood and Good On You centralize eco-conscious products, simplifying access to ethical brands by emphasizing ethical sourcing, fair labor practices, and eco-friendly materials. These platforms target consumers already inclined toward sustainability.
Browser Extensions to Sustainable Alternatives: Tools like askBelynda, Ecowiser, and Beagle Button provide real-time recommendations for eco-friendly products directly on e-commerce sites like Amazon, offering alternatives without disrupting the shopping experience.
Carbon Footprint Tracking Tools: Pebble tracks carbon emissions associated with purchases and presents personalized dashboards to raise awareness and encourage lower carbon footprints.
Affiliate Marketing for Environmental Cause: TreeClicks links purchases to reforestation projects by donating a percentage of the purchase value, enabling users to contribute to environmental initiatives effortlessly.
We chose to focus on consumer products due to their central role in environmental and social challenges. Hyper-consumerism, driven by e-commerce, exacerbates waste, resource depletion, carbon emissions, and unethical labor practices while reducing supply chain transparency. By targeting consumer habits, we aim to shift behaviors toward circular economy principles that emphasize reuse, conservation, and sustainability.
Our focus on clothing and secondhand alternatives stems from the fashion industry’s significant environmental and ethical impacts. Fast fashion drives overproduction, waste, and exploitative labor, making it a key area for intervention. Our design reduces demand for new production, highlights secondhand options, and provides real-time insights into the environmental and social costs of purchases. Integrating these features into shopping flows empowers consumers to make sustainable choices and address systemic overconsumption.
Addressing Hyper-consumerism
Ideation and
Opportunity Spaces
Solution
Cirkular is intended to guide users toward more eco-conscious purchasing decisions by considering a product’s entire life cycle and environmental impact. The core idea was to redefine what it means to have “buying power” by encouraging consumers to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term cost savings.
Behavioral Nudges: Implementing default options that favor sustainable products and providing prompts that encourage eco-friendly choices
Education: Providing educational content about climate initiatives and the impact of consumer choices to bridge information gaps.
Personalized Recommendations: Leveraging algorithms to suggest sustainable products aligned with individual preferences and values.
Transparent Information: Offering clear, accessible sustainability metrics and labels to empower informed decision-making.
Social Features and Community Engagement: Incorporating social sharing options to leverage social influence and encourage discussions about sustainability.
Our initial design incorporated functions that would ultimately be implemented into our final design. These features include an overview of user capabilities and interfaces, including product scoring between A-F based on sustainability practices and certifications that are made available, alternative product evaluation and a personal dashboard.
Item Cards: The evaluation of each item would include general manufacturing parameters, such as type of material, life expectancy and other details that comprise the scoring makeup of an item. Here, users would have the option to move away from a less sustainable product to a de-facto environmentally friendly alternative with a single click.
When the user engages with a product recommendation, a detailed overview of the item’s scorecard will be displayed. This information allows users to explore the story behind the product, providing insight into its environmental, social, and ethical impacts, helping them understand exactly how their purchase affects the planet.
Low Fidelity Designs
Our goal for sustainable product recommendation is to analyze products added to a user’s cart and provide real-time recommendations for sustainable alternatives, using infrastructure similar to reverse image search feature, if the selected product falls below a predetermined sustainability threshold. Sustainable products would range from scanned items at donation and thrift stores, online listings at secondhand marketplaces, artisan goods by sustainable and high end companies.
Sustainable Product Recommendation
Our goal for the sustainability impact dashboard is to track and visualize the user’s sustainability progress and impact over time. We include personalize impact metrics, such as carbon emissions saved, water usage reduces, waste diverted from landfills, sand support toward ethical labor practices.
Sustainability Impact Dashboard
Shifting focus to Secondhand Shopping: Through our interviews, we discovered that we should prioritize a circular economy and resource reduction through reuse, rather than promoting new products that follow sustainable practice.
Simplifying Metrics and Using Storytelling: Multiple experts encouraged us to explorer storytelling techniques and simplified presentation of our metrics.
Eliminating Ineffective Features: Our interviews suggested to us that gamification may not appeal to all users.
Encouraging Reflective Consumption: Our research highlighted the importance of a dashboard or interface where users can see their collective environmental impact over time.
Inclusive Language: Our research show the importance of fairness and inclusivity, avoiding technical jargon. We want to challenge social norms of overconsumption while providing a comfortable atmosphere for those who are not familiar with sustainable practices.
Usability Testing I
We conducted interviews with professors from various academic backgrounds and interests: Behavioral Psychology, English and Narrative Writing, Human-Computer Interaction, Sustainability, and Economics. After introducing our project and discussing its effectiveness, our team decided to implement these changes.
The evaluation of our first design revealed key limitations that hindered its effectiveness. Reliance on accurate sustainability data for product ratings proved impractical due to resource constraints and limited brand transparency, leading to gaps that risked misleading users. The design’s complexity and extensive features increased cognitive load, causing decision fatigue, while oversimplified sustainability scoring failed to capture the nuance of environmental and social impacts.
Other challenges included difficulties securing discounts from sustainable artisan brands, failure to address hyper-consumerism, and an overcomplicated design with unclear value. These issues highlighted the need for a more streamlined, user-focused approach to drive sustainable consumer behavior.
Challenges and Limitations
Plug-in Features
Onboarding
The goal of the onboarding phase is to introduce the plugin’s features, gather sustainability preference, and facilitate sustainability goal settings. The prototype includes a questionnaire to assess user concern for the environment, user goals for specific, measurable change, and an explanation of core features, including sustainable product recommendations, the sustainability score, and the sustainability impact dashboard.
Mid Fidelity Prototypes
Onboarding
The walkthrough guides users through the inner workings of Cirkular, offering context behind product scores and explaining how “Kore” items are used to develop these scores based on key manufacturing parameters. Users are presented with a visualization of alternative purchasing options, illustrating how each choice impacts the environment.
To enhance the personalized experience, users will be prompted to specify their priorities when shopping for an alternative product. These factors are carefully considered to provide the most sustainable suggestions possible, without compromising the user’s preferences and shopping needs.
Sustainable Product Recommendation
The side page will display similar products, each with its own score and detailed information. The featured item will be highlighted, along with key parameters such as product features, price, and an overview of the environmental costs associated with its manufacturing.
A detailed comparison will be made between the selected product and its substitute, with parameters covering all three cornerstones—ethical, economic, and environmental—displayed in relation to the ideal "Kore" article of clothing.
Impact Dashboard
Our Impact Dashboard details the net-positives the user has made on the environment, including the amount of water saved, the CO2 offset, the amount of money saved, and the user’s personal sustainability impact score. A milestone system and the user’s recent activity also encourages sustainable practices through positive reinforcement.
Conclusion
Through Cirkular, our team has provided an interesting way to address the hesitancy of sustainable, secondhand shopping in an increasingly hyper-consumerist world. After speaking with experts across the academic spectrum and developing a design based on researched insights, we believe that consumer-oriented design concepts like Cirkular have a chance to slow down the effects of climate change.
Our team is still undergoing design changes, specifically focusing on creating a unique brand identity as well as implementing key storytelling strategies to bridge the gap between lack of sustainable fashion transparency and consumers.
In order to reach larger audiences and inspire broader movements in consumer behavior and e-commerce, our team is also working on incorporating social features for community engagement. Using a bold brand identity with a focus on Gen Z, we believe that the future of Cirkular can leverage social media to inspire a generational call to action to address the climate crisis.
Introducing stronger storytelling techniques will clearly explain purpose, metrics, methodologies, and features and “Kore Standards”. We also want to experiment with visual hierarchy and frames to create a more seamless product recommendation page.
Next steps
Refined Onboarding Process and Navigation
Creating a bold and unique UI kit can appeal to greater audiences, especially Gen Z audiences.
Brand Identity Evaluations
Enhancing Personalization
Adding more customizable filters and metrics in the dashboard can incentivize sustainable behaviors in users that come out of their genuine interests to improve our environment, rather than predetermined metrics.
Storytelling and Human-Centered Design: After presenting experts without design, our experts still reminded us of the importance of reliable narratives and visuals to enhance engagement.
Clarity Issues: The “Kore Standard” metric lacked clear explanation. They suggested that we rethink and reorganize the way we explain what Kore is.
Platform Familiarity Assumption: Our experts noted our assumptions about user familiarity with secondhand platforms such as Poshmark, the RealReal, and ThreadUp. They suggested we recommend introductory guidance or eliminating platform selection altogether.
Sustainable Product Recommendation Streamlined Comparisons: Our experts informed us that users may prefer immediate, clear access to sustainability assessments with minimal clicks. Our design had far too many clicks and could be confusing for users.
Ranking Logic and Transparency: The rankings were unclear to our expert. They suggested that we need clearer logic, transparency, and streamlined comparison interfaces to meet user expectations.
Brand Recognition: She noted a lack of distinctive branding, diluting the interface’s identity during product recommendations. We should have a more consistent and recognizable brand throughout the interface.
Usability Testing II
Expert Insights
User Insights
As the second part of our evaluation process, we conducted usability testing with several potential users. All of these users were between the ages of 18 and 24, so it can be presumed that the vast majority of them were already familiar with information technology such as ours.
Purpose Clarity: There was initial confusion over the plugin’s role as a browser extension rather than a standalone platform highlighted the need for upfront clarification.
Transparency and Interactivity: Users desired clearer explanations for sustainability ratings and interactive design elements to meet their expectations.
Data Gaps: Missing data defaulting to an “F” grade was confusing, necessitating clearer communication.
Data Transparency: Persistent interest in data sources and methodologies emphasized the need for ongoing accessibility of this information.