Happy Bear
UI/UX Design_Senior Thesis
Happy Bear is an App and Web browser extension that helps people to reduce environmentally harmful plastic packaging by raising awareness and providing options to choose lower-waste packaged products.
How I started.
I’ve always been interested in sustainability and plastic products have been commonplace in our modern life for decades. Plastics have a huge negative impact on our environment and is a serious problem I wanted to solve. Originally I had an idea of teaching people how to recycle properly and helping them understand what and how to recycle. But even if we recycle everything we use, it won’t be enough.
What is the Problem?
01 / Products are generating too much trash by using wasteful packaging.
02 / People have limited options in terms of avoiding wasteful packaging.
Research.
From research, I learned that our plastic waste will increase 4x by 2050. New plastic is CHEAPER than recycled plastic to produce because It takes a lot of energy and effort to clean the plastic to make them recyclable. Consequently, most companies don’t use recycled plastic.
Hypothesis.
The best way to deal with this problem is to avoid plastic products as much as you can.
Solution
Reduce wasteful plastic packaging by providing people with options to choose lower-waste packaging products.
Part 1: App
Tracks the users plastic packaged items and provides alternative lower-waste packaging products.
Part 2: Web Browser Extension
Automatically finds and suggests lower-waste packaging alternatives.
How it works?
Once Happy Bear browser extension is installed on your browser, when you get to any online checkout page, it reads products in your cart, searches alternate waste-free packaging options within the website you are shopping in and will display on the right side of the page. And you can directly go to their website and purchase too.
Target Audience
I wanted to zoom into a specific buyer type. Among the buyers, they are people who are motivated or unmotivated to reduce waste. There are buyers who are aware or not aware of how much waste they are individually producing. I wanted to focus on this quadrant because it’s easier to influence once they have an information. However, not everyone is ready to make a lifestyle change. So I decided to focus on people who already have high motivation to reduce waste but are lacking information or habits to do so.
Branding
I chose a polar bear as a mascot because it is an animal that is often used to show the impact of global warming and with this bear users can engage with the app.
General Consumer Journey
Information Architecture
Wireframe
User Testing
User Testing Participants: 4
Key Take Aways
Users tend to tap on the bear the most and expecting to have interaction with it.
Users want to tap on the number in orange to check their items.
Hoping to manually enter data.
