Joanna Mabon
Changing tracks
UX DESIGN / SERVICE DESIGN / USER RESEARCH
5 mins to read
While working at Deloitte I led the UX design and UR for an app that tracked the carbon released by Deloitte's business travel. Our aim was to encourage change to Deloitte's business travel (and subsequent carbon production) by informing users of their individual carbon impact.
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This project was self-run, side of desk, while we each worked full time on our client commitments. We eventually gained partner sponsorship and the concept was taken to the sustainability selection board for North and South Europe Deloitte.
We came up with the idea for a gamified carbon calculator during a hackathon - during that time I focused on the service design, business case and quick wire frames
At the time (pre-covid) Deloitte was the largest buyer of airline tickets in the world, and employees usually travelled to clients every week (sometimes to Canada and back). Deloitte calculated carbon emissions produced from travel using amount spent on expenses, producing extremely inaccurate data.
We decided this was where we would focus our attention. We needed a way to accurately track the carbon produced from travel, to allow users to make data-based decisions on the mode and frequency of travel. By putting actual data of individual carbon spend in the hands of employees we hoped to encourage them to reduce their carbon impact.
We would make evidence based recommendations to individuals on alternative transport (e.g. train instead of flight) and project leaders on alternate travel schedules (e.g. travelling every other week).
We wanted to focus on gamification, using a tier based and competitive approach to encourage users to enter their data and reduce their carbon emissions.
"I could see this really changing the way we operate as a company"
Hackathon lead partner
Post hackathon we created the MVP, which we used to gain partner sponsorship - I led the design and research through MVP creation
While defining our MVP we decided to remove gamification, but retain comparison to project
Removal of gamification was a difficult decision as we felt the gamification was the tool's unique selling point and would encourage uptake and behavioural changes. However gamification was technically difficult to put in place, would only be relevant once we had a large user base and would require sign off from senior leadership at Deloitte. Therefore agreed it didn’t make sense as part of our initial MVP.
We wanted to understand if employees would enter their data to gain meaningful results, so we ran a successful pilot using basic excel entry and conducted research
We created a basic excel model with a built in carbon calculator that we tested on a project of 40 people to gain an initial view of interest, take up and the quality of data produced.
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All 40 people completed the excel each week for 4 weeks
85% of participants saw the value in understanding their carbon emissions
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A key pain point that came out of this was that users found added admin difficult.
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The results of this experiment led us to believe employees would be happy to use the carbon calculator if it was easy to use and did not add significantly to their existing admin.
I created a low fidelity clickable prototype, which I used for usability testing
I conducted user research with employees of different seniority within the business
Overall feedback for the tool was overwhelmingly positive, but once again the high level of existing personal admin was raised as a pain point.
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The partner we interviewed decided to sponsor the project and put a senior resource on the team to engage stakeholders across the firm and gain some traction.
Following our user research and usability sessions I updated the UX of our MVP and built out a prototype in sketch using material UI components
Trip duplication
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Based on our key pain point, we added the ability to duplicate existing trips in order to reduce personal admin.
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A user is able to select a trip from the calendar view to view the trip summary. From the trip summary they click "duplicate".
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A new trip will be created with all details entered, except the dates. Once the user has populated the trip with the correct dates they will be able to continue.
I created two dashboards which would be available within the app - we wanted users to make data driven decisions to change behaviour
Personal employee dashboard
"Quick numbers"
Immediately catches the eye of users so they are able to see their own carbon emissions, those of the project and the change to these amounts. We decided to have both the actual about and the amount of trees require to offset this amount so the employee could put this into real terms.
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Breakdown per type
Emission breakdown per type of event (e.g. hotel vs flight) allows the user to see what the biggest contributors to their carbon emission are and therefore know where to make changes to their routine to make the most difference.
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Breakdown by week
Employees are able to quickly see their weekly changes in carbon emissions based on their travel decisions with a comparison of their weekly average to the average of the project. Research has shown comparison to peers is one of the most convincing statistics to encourage change.
Project dashboard with two views according to role based access
Role based access
Based on user research we wanted all employees to be able to access the project view for full transparency. However only project leadership would be able to see names of employees and their associated data.
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"Quick numbers"
View of project in numbers i.e. amount of carbon, trees needed to offset carbon and change in carbon emissions per week.
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Emission per type
Project leadership will quickly be able to identify what is having the largest impact on carbon emissions.
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Recommendations
The tool will make recommendations on how to reduce projects carbons - these will learn from changes other projects have made and the suggestions will be specific to the project's data.
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Breakdown per person
Only the project leadership will be able to see this. Our user research showed up the project leadership / green champion would need names to change behaviour. Although we discussed if this was a breach of privacy, the project leadership already have access to the employees expense data, so they are able to encourage behavioural changes.
What happened next
We took our tool to North & South Europe sustainability board with recommendations on what we needed i.e. testing the tool in more projects across the firm, integration with expense system and buy in from the firm’s leaders to ensure implementation across the firm was a success.
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A team within the French firm had also been working through solutions to tackle the firm’s business travel and elements from each of our solutions were combined – a large scale discovery was being setup as I left the firm.