Suli
Suli is a companion app to support users' everyday practices to reduce negative impacts on environment.
Role
Period
Award
Team
UX Designer & Researcher
Spring 2019
IDEA 2020 Finalist
Namcheol Her, Hyojung Jin, Jinbaek Lee, Hwang Kim
It was my first UX project in my University, UNIST. As a part of my classes, ‘Product Design1‘, 4 students were gathered on a topic ‘Sustainability’. The scope of the topic ’Sustainability’ was so wide that we began to talk about each other's interests or concerns. And we started to focus on the reality that “It is too difficult to practice a sustainable lifestyle”, even though someone is really passionate about save the earth.
Award
Concept Video
Problem
“Sustainable Lifestyle is not sustainable”
Although a sustainable lifestyle is becoming more important, it's not easy to achieve. Anyone who has tried to live a sustainable life confronts some curious moments whether they're making right choice or whether their effort does really result in good impacts on the environment. In addition, facilities, guides and public interest for sustainability were insufficient in Korea in 2019. These obstacles make people discouraged to keep living a sustainable life.
1
Consumers had to find out sustainable products themselves. There were less than 5 Zero Waste Shop in the whole country. Even if through onlines shop, consumers had to buy sustainable products separately here and there, spending shipping fee separately.
Where can I find sustainable product?
2
Is it really sustainable?
Green washing, fake news makes it difficult to judge whether this is really sustainable decision
3
Do my all efforts really matter? Is it really helpful to save earth? People who struggles to live sustainable life often fall into a dilema of not being sure whether their efforts are meaningful
Do my all efforts make any progress?
“How might we help people
who are struggling to live a sustainable life?”
Solution
Sustainable Market with eco-index
Provide sustainability information of products with 4 indexes
⮕ User can easily understand the environmental effects that product has made.
QR scanning of a offline store barcode shows sustainable products list of the store by connecting stock database of the store.
⮕ Users can find out eco-friendly products easily in nearby market
Clearly and simply described entry
⮕ help consumers to make considerate consumption easily
Share problems
and discuss better ways
Daily suggested environmental issues and keywords
⮕ expand knowledge and stay tuned with environmental issue
Drop agendas and start a conversation
⮕ Because of the complexity of environmental issue, it’s hard to start conversation in daily life. Users can start a conversation easily and freely in Suli Salon.
Check your progress
Usage history in eco- index based on market data
⮕ motivates users' with showing how much their sustainable efforts has been achieved through considerate consumption
Tangible eco-index expressed in common consumption in daily life.
Logging consumtion → number of A4 paper
Plastic consumption → number of straw
Co2 emission → running time of a car
Water consumption → liter
SuLi is a companion app to support users' everyday practice
to reduce negative impact to the environment, animals, nature, and ecosystem.
Design Process
Problem discovery
Narrow targeting
Persona Creation
01. Define
User interview
Sensitizer → Toolkit → QuestionnaireInsights extracting & filtering
Surprises vs ConfirmedExpert interview
Vice president of Investment company
CEO of environmental startup
02. Research
Main function ideation
User story
UX/UI Design
Concept board & video
03. Design
Research
Persona
We have set the direction of the service for those who strive for sustainable lifestyle but struggle.
Then, who is most interested in sustainable lifestyle and having a hard time practicing that?
It came to the conclusion that it is a mom who has children.
After creating a persona, we recruited interviewees who had similar background with persona.
In-depth Interview
We sent sensitizer a week before interview. By providing a certain form which interviewee can trace their habits and inconveniences in daily life, they can bring various experiences into interview easily.
1. Sensitizing interviewee
2. Tool-kit for interview
By using took-kit, interviewee can easily ideate functions with combining, ordering and removing various features in took-kit.
The interview was conducted in two sessions. First, asking questions based on sensitizers. Second, ideating and evaluating functions based on tool-kit.
3. In-depth interview
Insights
1. They wanted to know how much their efforts contributed to the environment
When there is no strong evidence of impacts about what they practice, sustainable lifestyle, they are discouraged by the skeptical opinion from others.
Showing environmental footage in negative way rather discourage users to keep put efforts in sustainability.
2. They showed great interst in sustainable products information
No matter how sustainable the product is, users don't want to use products that are not comfortable or pretty
It's hard to find sustainable products one by one.
3. They were willing to learn, practice and share sustainable tips
When they learn new tips, they guided their family to practice.
Easy sustainable tips in daily life lowered the hurdles to sustainale lifestyle.
Ideation
We decided Design Direction based on…
1. Feature priority by interviewee
Interviewee ranked the features in tool-kit according to their needs in daily life.
2. Function & Context Ideation
To think outside box, we invited other teams and ideated all together sharing research results and insights. Detailed functions and contexts were driven.
3. User story
By organizing ideas in the form of [As…, I want…, so that…], ideas were filtered and refined from users’ perspective.
Wireframe
Impact
SuLi suggests public that there is so much things that individuals can do within their daily life. Easy and intuitive functions bridge the gap between sustainability-experts and normal people. This can be forwarded to encourage individuals and society to work for the environment a little bit more, and further encouraging businesses to join the movement.
Benefit for Society
In an equal starting line, sustainable products have many difficulties to compete with other unsustainably mass-produced products. Because of their green material and sustainable package, it has been hard to be an eye-catching product on the shelf, in terms of price and aesthetic aspects.
SuLi provides an original platform where companies can promote how much their products are sustainable with the indicator of sustainability. By providing clear sustainability information about the product making process, companies can improve the business’ image as well.
Benefit for company
Reflection
Researching the users' life from multi-angles helps design in detail
Initially, we focused only on ‘practicing sustainability’ itself. However, after interview, we found out that the context and purpose of using the app could be much more complex than we expected. Target users had works they had to do, had specific role in the family, and had values that they try to pursue. Based on the insights, we tracked users’ daily life with sensitizer and induced their experiences with tool-kit. As a results, we were able to make a more detailed decision by immersing ourselves in users’ shoes.Getting feedback from business experts (CEO of environmental Start-up, Vice president of Investment company)
Since only designers and users participated in the design process, we wondered if it was realistic enough. Therefore, we asked for feedback from experts after drawing the wireframe. They helped us consider various stakeholders such as sellers, government and companies with explaining about current market situation. The interview with experts helped me to consider unseen stakeholders and to design with a balance that everyone can be satisfied with.