MuMu: Helping reduce the use of single use plastic bag and promote environment protection.
A bag
A universal VIP card
An app-centered service
Duration: Feb-Mar 2019
Team: Wenjing Zhang | Lu Wei
Role: Research, System design, Reward feature
Project Overview
Background: For decades, the single-use plastic bag reigned as the dominant solution for one of the most common human activities: getting a purchase home. The convenience, cheap cost, and cleanliness come with a substantial environmental price that we can't afford in the future.
Solution: MuMu is a convenient, easy-to-use and environmentally friendly sustainability campaign, which encourages people to reuse the same shopping bag to protect the environment and get shopping rewards at the same time, in order to form a habit of environmental protection. This sustainability campaign is ran by a union of various grocery companies to reduce shopping carrier pollution. The more you use the same shopping bags, the more contribution you devote to the environment, and the more you will save.
How might we transport good from retailer to destination in a way that is compatible with diverse retail system, delivers ease and convenience for customer, and reduce environment impact?
Preview
1. Add a MuMu bag
We provide the option for users to scan the QR code on the MuMu bag to add it. To support edge cases, we also provide an option for them to manually enter the ID number to add a MuMu bag.
3. Use the in-app currency(energy), to donate or redeem discounts
We provide the option for users to scan the QR code on the MuMu bag to add it. To support edge cases, we also provide an option for them to manually enter the ID number to add a MuMu bag.
2. Visualize and quantify the environmental contribution
The user's contribution to the environment through resting bags is visualized with MuMu bags and leaves and quantified with virtual energy, which will motivate them to go further and keep using it.
4. Facilitate the shopping experience
Facilitate customer's shopping experience with shopping lists and reminders, two of the most common features that they use while shopping.
A bag is at the center of the final interaction at almost any store-be that retail, grocery, or the corner pharmacy. And the decision for consumers, if it even exists, isn't an easy one.
A new way home-IDEO report
Design Research
From a bag to a system: Why design a new bag just won't cut it?
Insight 1:
The environmental problem cannot be simply solved by retail bags of a different material or structure
Insight 2:
A certain amount of use times has to be reached to make a reusable bag genuinely eco-friendly.
We first explored whether the material could change the environmental value of a bag and make it more environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic. Various types of retail bags are adopted by different grocery stores to replace single-use plastic bags. However, the economic cost of retail bags does not only occurs in the production process, but also in the landfill phase, which means it increases throughout their whole life circle. From this perspective, a single-use plastic bag is the most environmentally friendly option, due to its lowest economic cost compared to other types of bags. [2]
Who we designed for
Average grocery shoppers are interested in using fewer single-use plastic bags.
To better understand our user, we interviewed 4 people who always go to the grocery stores and administered 52 questionnaires, in order to learn more about people's thoughts and behavior while shopping.
Retailers that want to build a sustainable eco image and reduce the expanse of offering free plastic bags.
To better understand the needs and requirement from retailer, we conduct desk research and literature review.
key findings:
1. Among all interviewees, 2 people said they were willing to protect the environment, but did not know how to do that. They need more environmental education and instructions. 1 person said he did not know much about the meaning of protecting the environment, lacking of the motivation to do so.
2. Around 60% of people do not know it takes decades for plastic bags to be decomposed, which indicates people's awareness of environmental protection should be further enhanced.
3. Older people always bring paper coupons and paper shopping lists to grocery stores, while young people prefer to use digital coupons and direct cash back.
4. Young people are willing to try something new and cool, like a new kind of rewards to save money, although their busy daily life did not allow them to spend too much time on new things.
5. Nearly half of the people did not bring their own reusable shopping bags to grocery stores due to their poor memory.
key findings:
1. According to the interviews, none of the interviewees believed that big retailer is eco-friendly.
2. Currently, there is no direct relationship between retailer's loyalty program and environmental protection
3. There are various evidences that retailers are uniting to seek solutions to single-use plastic bags
4. According to Nielsen, the U.S. sustainability market is projected to reach $150 billion in sales by 2021, and big retailers want to make a profit through the process of transformation to a sustainable image.
5. Even if being sustainable isn't a personal priority, the idea of using a purchase to do good is attractive to many shoppers.
First we concluded 2 personas as our target users according to the findings from interviews and questionnaires. Our 2 target groups are people who care about saving money and people who care about sustainability.
Then we concluded the incentives for our target users as Savings + Value + Convenience. Then we researched how current grocery stores incentivize their customers, including CVS Health, Target and Walmart, etc [3].
What we found was that grocery stores always have loyalty programs, which are a marketing strategy designed to encourage customers to continue to shop at or use the services of a business associated with the program. For grocery stores, the loyalty programs can help increase sales and customers' brand awareness, while for customers, the loyalty programs can help reduce grocery bills. We used the affinity mapping to extract some key features of loyalty programs that we could apply to our design as our reward system.
System Introduction
We designed Mumu, a sustainability system with the core of a mobile app and other companion elements including customers, MuMu bag and a union of various grocery stores (Closed Loop Partners: CVS Health, Target and Walmart, etc. [3])
MuMu encourages people to reuse one shopping bag to protect the environment and get shopping rewards at the same time, in order to form a habit of environmental protection. The more you use the same shopping bags, the more contribution you devote to the environment, and the more you will save.
Since the mobile app connects the entire sustainability system, we focused on the user experience design of the app as our next steps.
Synthesis
Design Goal
We defined the primary goal and secondary goal according to target users' needs and pain points and key features of current loyalty programs, and prioritized the primary goal as the minimum requirement for a MVP.
Core Functionality
Design
Wireframes
Prototype
We did a usability test on 5 people with a lot of shopping experience, and 2 of them have the experience of using coupons. At the same time, we asked them to fill out a questionnaire after finishing test tasks, in order to quantitively measure the success of the design. The metrics include the degree of convenience, ease and environmental friendliness. Here are the results:
User Feedback
Energy Page:
1. Users were confused with the total energy in Home page and the level info in Rewards page, which are similar.
2. Users did not want to make a choice among similar rewards and felt confused with the difference among all rewards.
3. Some users hoped that the form of donation and rewards could be more convenient, without too many troublesome steps to use these functions and redeem rewards.
Shopping List Page:
1. Users felt it inconvenient to delete a shopping list, especially when they need to use a new shopping list every week.
2. Users thought the whole processes were too troublesome, too many steps to finish writing a shopping list.
Refined Information Architecture
According to the primary goal, secondary goal and user feedback, we re-drew the site map of the mobile app to clarify the framework of the entire app. This is to ensure that all components are placed where users expect them, while making the experience more smooth.
Refined User Flow
We refined the user flow for Karen. The purpose of constructing the user flow is to determine the pages and operation steps that our target user Karen goes through in order to achieve her respective expected goals based on the user feedback. This allowed us to focus not only on the operation steps of her, but also on the specific functionality when designing the interfaces to provide a better shopping experience.
Mood Board & Legibility Test
Iteration
Energy Page
1. Redesigned the info architecture and combine similar functionality (energy & level info) together in Energy page.
2. Redesigned the reward system: unlock a certain number of rewards every week, reducing the available options. Designed detailed rewards and made information more clear.
3. Unlocking a certain number of rewards also helped to add convenience for donation and redeeming rewards.
Shopping List Page
1. Redesigned the info architecture of a shopping list card. Deleted less important info and made the delete function more noticeable.
2. Simplified the whole processes by reducing the shopping list page to only one page, without cumbersome restrictions, which provides users with maximum freedom to edit the shopping list.
Account Page
Future Steps
1. Consider more edge cases
There might be some edge cases when people add a new MuMu bag, such as QR code scan failure, QR code scan timeout, repeated addition, input ID error, etc. Adding a new MuMu bag is an indispensable step to use our sustainability system, thus we should consider more edge cases to optimize the user experience of this step.
2. Achieve the secondary goal
We only achieved our primary goal and part of our secondary goal currently, which are encouraging people to reuse bags and facilitating the shopping experience. However, increasing people's environmental awareness is also our secondary goal. Therefore, we will take this goal as our overall design goal in the next step.
3. Research more in the reward system
We only proposed one possible reward system method, which might not be the best reward system for the business. The reward system can be prototyped and evaluated to suit various retailers who will use the Mumu service.
Reference
[1] Kitiara, P. (2019, June 28). Are Paper Bags Really an Environmentally Friendly Alternative to Plastic? Retrieved from https://medium.com/@kitiara.pascoe/are-paper-bags-really-an-environmentally-friendly-alternative-to-plastic-26fe51d79986
[2] OpenIDEO. (2020). A New Way Home. Retrieved from https://www.closedlooppartners.com/beyond-the-bag/a-new-way-home/
[3] Closed Loop Partners. (2020, July 20). Closed Loop Partners Launches Groundbreaking Consortium with CVS Health, Target and Walmart to Reinvent the Plastic Retail Bag. Retrieved from https://www.closedlooppartners.com/closed-loop-partners-launches-groundbreaking-consortium-with-cvs-health-target-and-walmart-to-reinvent-the-plastic-retail-bag/