Building the brand foundations

One of the first things I did when I joined was setting up a mini-workshop call with the team which, aside from being a great ice-breaker, allowed us to start understanding the direction we would like to take the brand.

We defined the mission, purpose, and values of Greenpick independently of what the product would be specifically. They became the north star of what we should look at when making product decisions.

Brand personality

Making it tangible

From there I've built the Greenpick brand identity that encompasses the aforementioned values. Some of the touchpoints can be found below in a very brief summary developed to enable all team members to produce consistent outputs (PDF’s, presentations, socials,...)

Note: The symbol was designed by Sofia Charola before I joined. It was adapted in color to fit the new branding (with permission).

Testing the eco-reviews concept

Before we started designing the actual solution we decided to test the eco-reviews idea through a simple WhatsApp group with 30 volunteers. During 2 weeks they could post ‘eco-reviews’ on any product or service they used.   

Afterwards we created a survey and interviewed the volunteers. This gave us a good picture of the challenges faced which lead to various ideas of possible design solutions. 

Numeric summary of the whatsapp test: 30 participants, 14 days, 91 reviews

Whatsapp messages with eco-reviews from the group testers

Some of the insights we've learned

- Images were shared often 
- People frequently engaged with eachother after a review to share a similar experience or to suggest a solution
- There were cases where the review wasn’t ‘good nor bad’ but more of a question
- Some people felt shy about sharing a review about a specific product. They’d like it to be anonymous;

We actually ended up rewarding our most avid testers with an “eco-reward” by planting a tree with our own hands on their behalf and provide them with a certificate.

Tree being planted by the team and the complementary certificates

Different user types, different user stories

Throughout the interviews and surveys we started identifying different potential user types and their needs. We spent some time as a team researching and defining them before entering the design phase.

One of our team calls going through different reports on sustainability behaviour

This research led us to create the user stories seen below, that helped define our main focus for the project.

User stories formatted as 'As a user...I want to...so that I can...'

The ideation phase

Using my trusty pen and paper, the next step was making sense of the flow on a user-to-screen level. Most of the user stories were accounted for and I tried to explore some different ideas based on them.

Hand drawn wireframes of consumer side main flow

Hand drawn wireframes of company side main flow

Prioritizing a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

We obviously wanted to cover all the user stories and all the features but realistically we needed to get something out to test first. Plus we are a small team with mostly developers working on the side of their main job.   

We decided to focus on the core of the platform: enabling a user to write a review and a company to read/respond to it. A more complex search with categories became something to explore in a very near future.

Creating the flows and initial prototypes

This helped us find missing states and create a closer representation of the MVP.

An initial prototype was developed and tested with our group testers where the main takeaway was that the review flow was still not simple enough. A lot of iteration went into the review flow and will be shown later in this case study. 

Wireframes of main flow on consumer side

Translating the Brand into UI design

Making the reusable building blocks of our platform was since day one a priority to make development and design faster.   

When creating the design components it was important to perpetuate the brand aesthetic in a way that also respected fundamental UX/UI bases.

Some of the components created to fasten the design and dev process

Testing and iterating on the review system

We’ve been constantly testing the prototypes throughout the different stages of fidelity with friends and some volunteers we met through our Instagram account.

  Something we have been heavily focusing on is the the actual review system since it’s one of the key features of the platform. Therefore, it suffered several iterations to get to where we are now.  

We started with a 3 score system with the assumption that it would make it simple for most non ‘eco savy’ users to evaluate an initiative on ‘bad, average, great’.

But here’s what we’ve observed:

Three smiles review system and main issues found with users

Upgrading it to a 5 option review system

As explained in the image above, from our user interviews we understood that the 3 option review system wasn’t working, so we began studying other solutions. 

1. Expanding the smiles range

👎

Expressions were hard to distinguish. They need to be in context next to each other to be understood.

👎

Difficult to read when used in smaller sizes

👎

Relies too much on color making it not accessible

2. The standard 5 stars

💚

Users are very familiar with it since it's used as an universal review system

👎

Associated with reviewing quality overall. It doesn't instantly communicate eco-reviews

3. Adapting to our needs

💚

Leaf skeuomorphism. Easier to understand the review is about sustainability (or at least it challenges the thought before reviewing)

💚

Associated with our brand and logo

👎

Less familiar

After testing again we decided to go forward with the third option. We will, however, continue to improve our review system as we get more feedback since it’s crucial to the sucess of the platform.

Simplifying categories

Our goal is always to make reviews as accurate as possible. However it quickly became clear that having too many sub-categories was creating friction to our users as they were too specific and took too long to understand.

We had to remind ourselves that the ultimate goal is to make eco-reviews accessible to all. So a balance between simplicity and specificity needs to exist.

We decided to scrap completly the sub-categories and focus on the 4 overall categories by making them clearer.

Note: The choice of categories itself was based on my colleague’s research in sustainability KPIs around the world that applied to all company types (in the future we want to have different categories depending on the company type)

Preparing to launch

At the time of writing this article, our 2 software engineer friends are finishing the first version on their free time. We’re actively working together to be able to realistically launch it to our users.  

We want to keep iterating as well as adding new features that add more accuracy on the company side.  

The initial launch will include the following features:  

Searching. and analysing a company's impact

Agreggating all information about a company’s sustainability efforts in a simple, comprabale way was crucial. In the future we’d like to further develop categories to find new brands.

Writing an eco-review

The goal was to have a balance between ease-of-use and accuracy. Independently of how ‘eco-savy’ someone is, we wanted it to be possible to always give feedback. We made it so that reviewing categories isn’t mandatory, but it also means that they’ll be ranked as a less relevant result.

Receiving eco-rewards on the way

To incentivise users to write more eco-reviews we reward them with a little sustainable present – a tree planted on their behalf. This flow was designed to give a delightful moment to the user through an animation.

Creating a company profile

A step by step form that gives companies the opportunity to personalise their profile and display information about their sustainability efforts. It was important to give freedom at this stage but still guide them through examples of what they can include.

Responding to reviews through the dashboard

Ou goal was always to open a dialogue between costumers and companies to clarify any misconceptions and help each other achieve a greener future. We’ve avoided reinventing the wheel and attempted to make the experience as straightforward as possible.

Prototype

The start of something new

What problem are we trying to solve?

Problem 1

Spread out information 💻

Problem 2

Trust 🤝

Problem 3

Individual reach 📣

The proposal - giving voice to consumers