Project Overview

With the Alarming changes in global warming within the past three decades, scientists, world leaders, and people alike have been working towards restoring the earth from the effects of human interaction. Due to the pandemic and ongoing demand for hybrid to remote work, we witnessed ecosystems slowly but surely restoring themselves and noticed more people living presently and consciously. We have seen an increase in sustainable and minimalist ways of life to better the earth and ourselves as the human species.

Younger generations have inspired companies to care more about the long-term effects of climate change and ways they can get their employees to do their part. These social concerns all point to the need for developing a sustainable app that helps employees check and improve their lifestyles while encouraging support through team-building activities.

Teams that use platforms like Monday.com need an effective way to track environmental goals without disrupting their day-to-day work duties. The widget we have created provides a platform for sustainable practices while incentivizing engagement in the digital workplace.

Because of the above requirements, we designed our Widget, Green Works, for employees to learn and improve their lifestyle around climate change. Our team's solutions were to build a responsive widget in Monday.com’s marketplace that gamifies incentives focused on sustainable/environmental practices, an interactive pop-up in Monday’s platform, and a dashboard to organize and manage the team’s progress without disrupting workflow.

Contributions

DURATION
2 months - Full-time

SCOPE
Product strategy | UX design

TOOLS
Monday.com | Figma | Maze

Research: User interviews, analysis, feature prioritization & more.

Ideation: Design Studio & sketching wireframes

Design: Prototyping, Usability testing, report & more

Check out the presentation below

Scope of Work

Monday.com states they “decided to run a green app challenge this year because work technology can give teams the tools they need to address climate challenges and help organizations be proactive about bringing awareness and fighting climate change through the tech they use every day.”

Our team took on the challenge of building Green Works, an app that allows team members to choose sustainability tasks they wish to commit to over the course of a month. Each day, team members complete a brief check-in to keep track of their progress. Each task completed counts towards the team’s overall goal, which is decided by the team at the start of each period. Should they reach their goals at the end of the month, the team “wins” the prize and they collectively make progress in addressing climate change. Our major challenge was building our app into monday.com’s marketplace and implementing our climate change app into the hands of their 152K customers.

So we had to figure out what ways we could incorporate sustainability into the workplace. We went through some brainstorming of ideas before jumping into the design process

Process

The development behind our rational decisions

– what did we validate to arrive at our design?

The Challenge
& initial research

We came to the conclusion that most people in the workplace are not concerned about climate change or don't think about those issues when at work. So our team was looking to validate the following:

Hypothesis: Teams are interested in participating in initiatives to combat climate change only if it does not interfere with their workflow and ability to complete their tasks

How might we get teams excited about making a positive environmental impact?

We condensed the assumptions down to the following:

People are more likely to participate if they perceive the activities as “fun.”
People care about climate change but don’t know where to start or how they can help.
People don’t believe they contribute to climate change.
People think they need to make major lifestyle changes in order to reduce their carbon foot print, which feels discouraging to them.
People are more motivated to participate when there is an incentive.
People are more motivated to keep going/ stay engaged when they see their progress/ impact.
People are unaware of the various contributors to climate change.
Most people have adopted some form of sustainability practice (recycling, composting, buying local, etc.)
Convience is a major factor that will influence if someone does or does not take part in activities
People prefer to be notified by push notifications

Goals of Research

We set out to validate the following goals:

To identify our users’ base of knowledge about climate change-related issues. To gain insight into users' attitudes toward working sustainability practices in the workplace

To understand how and what our users are motivated by

To understand preferences regarding their workflow so we don’t design something disruptive

Feature Overview

Research

Understand Users, Define Pain Points, Develop Empathy

We conducted competitive research amongst other rival platforms to see what could be done differently on Monday and arrived at these insights:

Use of visual data/ easily scanable data
using subscription fees or donations to contribute to projects focused on addressing climate change
showing metrics/ data that highlights each users impact
use of “sharing” to increase awareness within networks

Research Methodology

We created a screener survey and recruited a few users for interviews. We sought out users who generally have used Monday or have used a platform similar to Monday in the workplace. The main goal of our user interviews was to capture in-depth data in order to help us validate or invalidate our initial problem statement and assumptions.

The majority of users, regardless of work environment have used a competitor platform required by their employers. While aware of Monday.com, they’ve never had to use the platform.

User Interviews + Findings

Throughout our user interviews, we noticed that most people were aware of the issues regarding climate change but essentially felt helpless and didn't know where to start, or how to help the cause. From our data breakdown, we focused on the following:

1. Users make changes to their lifestyle to do their part to address climate change

2. Users require flexibility in notification settings to adjust to personal preferences

3. Working professionals have experienced the impacts of climate change firsthand

4. People are more willing to participate if there is a personal benefit

Meet Chad, our Persona

All of the data we collected in interviews allowed us to create the ideal targeted audience who cares about climate change due to personal experience and wants to educate the masses without overwhelming anyone.

Chad's Journey

The journey map we’ve designed goes through the process of Chad’s (our persona) experience trying to create team-building exercises related to climate change. He wants to find a way to inform his team of this important topic while also keeping their attention, but in a way that doesn't disturb the workflow.

Our new focus

We validated 5/10 of the original assumptions through our research which gave us an opportunity to revise our original hypothesis and zero-in on our targeted demographic.

People are more likely to participate if they perceive the activities as “fun.”

People care about climate change but don’t know where to start or how they can help.

People don’t believe they contribute to climate change.

People think they need to make major lifestyle changes in order to reduce their carbon footprint, which feels discouraging to them.

People are more motivated to participate when there is an incentive.

People are more motivated to keep going/ stay engaged when they see their progress/ impact.

People are unaware of the various contributors to climate change.

Most people have adopted some form of sustainability practice (recycling, composting, buying local, etc.)

Convenience is a major factor that will influence if someone does or does not take part in activities

People prefer to be notified by push notifications

How might we encourage team members to participate in sustainability practices in the workplace in a way that does not interrupt their daily workflow?

MVP Reveal

Green Works allows team members to choose sustainability tasks they wish to commit to over the course of a month. Through our research, we established it would be best to allow the user to have the freedom to personalize their tasks. Each day, team members complete a brief check-in to keep track of their progress. Each task completed counts towards the team’s overall goal, which is decided by the team at the start of each period. Should they reach their goals at the end of the month, the team “wins” the prize and they collectively have made progress in addressing climate change.

Ideate
Brainstorm, innovate and sketch

Design Studio: Sketching + Concepting

We conducted a feature prioritization chart and phase map in order to determine what primary features needed to be launched first.Our team agreed on the following features to prioritize:

1. Flexible notification system

2. Customize notifications either climate reports, meetings, updates, etc

3. Gamify app to keep peers engaged and motivated with prizes, PTO, or other things to win

4. A highlight reel: showcasing team members' efforts and highlighting their progress

5. A visual tracking feature that builds incentive rewards

6. Offer suggestions for individual team members to reduce their carbon footprint like:
-unplugging unused devices
-reducing water consumption
-cold water washing

The initial sketches we did over zoom and in Figjam to discuss how we wanted the app to look visually keeping a view of a dashboard, tracking progress and a general widget that we can access for notifications and submission entries on tasks.

Design
Explore, critique, and refine

Design Iterations: High-fidelity Screens

Since we weren’t redesigning anything involving Monday’s layout it was a fairly smooth transition to creating pop-ups and the dashboard. Making sure we met Monday.com’s submission guidelines we had both a light and dark mode with our adjusted colors for accessibility.

Testing +
Success Metrics
Findings + Insights + Future recommendations

Initial User Testing: First Round

We completed 2 rounds of testing across 2 design iterations (the first being the original concept for the app before we made additional changes while cross collaborating with the developer on our team). For both rounds, we conducted unmoderated testing, which allowed us to get a great sample size of participants.We used maze to follow the hotspots of each user and what needed to be improved upon. During testing we closely observed the habits of users and how they interacted with our prompt of 3 tasks:

logging or submitting a weekly to monthly task
checking the team's progress
adding a new task to your personalized car on the dashboard

Findings + Takeaways

We removed users from the test that did not complete all 3 tasks

1. We made the “add task” button on the dashboard more recognizable to what users have come to expect in Monday, by making it the blue call to action color

2. We also worked to bring users' attention to our widget by adding an animation to visually engage.

The problem with both was they were not recognizable so in round two of testing

Second Round

In the second round of testing our numbers improved greatly. Task 1 still needed a bit of tweaking but tasks 2 and 3 had great success.

Takeaways from testing + improvements made with our developer

From the results of usability testing, we knew there needed to be a few changes to the overall concept. Due to time constraints, we made moderate tweaks to the design and prepared for handoff to our developer. We were fortunate to have a great collaboration with our developer and fixed a few gaps in the design.

1. Our color palette needed to be updated to pass accessibility.

2. We were required to have a light and dark mode for Monday and had to quickly design them out

3. We had a hard time trying to find a way to have the widget display across all boards and debated the decision to have it show up in the dashboard.

4. We had to discuss how our program identifies what counts as sustainable practice and settled with allowing peer pressure to keep the built-in safety net.

5. How would we send a notification to everyone if they don't have the widget or dashboard open?

6. We needed to add another page specifically for the admin to control the cards on the dashboard for the beginning of the month and to check in once a week to approve any new tasks.

7. We originally thought about a limit for tasks but added a scrolling feature to cards in order for users to add more than 4 visible tasks. As the deadline came close we decided to cap them at 4 tasks.

8. Allowing team leaders to go into their *admin page and reconfigure the app — or reset it for the next goal of the month — or to approve teammates to add new tasks on the page.

9. we got rid of the initial settings pop-up and — left the feature as the initial checklist

10. We needed to iron out notification behaviors:

— when do we want people to get notifications?

— when would they be prompted to fill in their daily check-in?

— would the entire team get notified if a goal has been reached?

— would a user be prompted at the start of the month when the user needs to add a new task?

Final challenges we ran into

UX challenges we ran into were mainly around recruiting people to interview or find usability testers. Over the course of the hackathon, we were able to do so but the process was quite slow.
As mentioned above, making sure our designs pass accessibility.
We copied the CSS for the text style catalog, and it references the fonts by URL. We didn’t have the fonts and needed to download them.
Trying to find a way to have the widget display across all boards, and debated the decision to have it show up in the dashboard
There was a bug in the code preventing the app from fully functioning in the Monday marketplace
creating terms of service & privacy policy

What’s next for Green Works

We faced a handful of challenges towards the end of our submission but this project felt so rewarding to complete. As we wait for the results of the hack, our intentions for future improvements are the following:

Change the disable notification on personal pages to a timer customized to any user’s liking.
Add the icon from board views to the top tab.
Fix the functional movement of the widget to show across all pages.
Incorporate a baseline calculator displaying carbon footprint emissions and progress in reducing emissions.
fix any bugs in the code that may have prohibited functionality or usability.