GreenRenter
‍Encouraging Behavioural Change

Project Type

Web

Date

2019

Client

GreenRenter

My Role

Scrum Master / UX Design

Summary

GreenRenter wanted to increase the engagement with their website, identified the pain points and saw what can be improved upon. All over a hackathon weekend.

What's the Story?

GreenRenter's initial goal was to help renters find sustainable homes in Australia. They created a website (RealEstate.com.au/Domain-style), but they were not gaining the traction they were hoping to have.

They decided to find out what the problem was and approached a hackathon (Random Hacks of Kindness) to get some assistance.

What Value Does This Bring?

The Beginning

We began with research, based on the personas that GreenRenter had provided. At the start, what we thought GreenRenter wanted was a property finder website, similar to Domain or RealEstate.

What we soon discovered was that people do not realise the need for sustainability. This lack of understanding of the need for sustainability was the reason why GreenRenter did not see the traction they wanted.

Once we had identified the problem as the lack of awareness of sustainable living, the next question was for people to understand their energy consumption in a household. Most people do not know how much energy they consume. We saw the need to change people's mindset and saw a need for a behavioural shift – to put sustainability as an option when looking for a home. So we changed the goal.

Goal:
Have people consider sustainability as a factor when looking for homes
when renting/buying, aside from Price and Location.

Impact

If the goals are met, sustainable living will be prevalent and have a positive impact on the environment and society.

To achieve that, we decided to build an energy calculator for people to visualise their energy profile (consumption). The calculator also served as a tool for GreenRenter to build a database from the anonymised data input.

“Do you know your energy consumption?”

The Challenge

We needed to change the status quo when property hunting. Turning that into "How might we" questions.

Mindset

How might we get people to consider sustainability as a factor when looking for a property?

Understanding

How might we make it easy for users to understand their energy profile?

The (Further) Research

As this project was conducted over a 10-hour hackathon, we had limited time to do research. To help users better understand their energy consumption, we focused on the usage of the top 6 energy-consuming appliances (Air-Conditioner, Dishwasher, Washer, Dryer, Fridge and TV) where energy ratings are mandatory.

Readily Available Online Database

To reinforce the importance of energy consumption, the calculator required users to find out the energy rating of their appliances and the number of hours they use per week. This helped to form an overall picture of their household's energy consumption.

In the initial planning, there was much discussion around the flow of the calculator. How many steps should this take? Should the number of hours be on a separate page? How should users add/remove items?

We did not want users to be intimidated by the first step with the myriad of input fields. On the other hand, we wanted the process to not be too much of a bother for users to click out. We decided to have users input their appliances with their weekly usage at the first step as this makes the process quicker overall.

The Design

We quickly sketched out the wireframes of the landing site on a whiteboard before getting to work on a hi-fidelity prototype.

Focusing on the ease for the user was our priority here.

Wireframing Hackathon Style

Funny story, my laptop died on me during this weekend, so I ended up being a hybrid UX Designer/Scrum Master. This allowed me to work closely with both the designers and the devs, I needed to see what was feasible in the short amount of time we had.

Is a back-end necessary for this? What will be needed when building this product? How long did they need to build out a working product?

Green, But Too Green

In our first design, we realised that the colours were not working, and everything was hard to read. If we kept it, we knew that people will navigate away. Scaling back the intensity of the green, we found a more pleasant shade of green and worked on the copy of the site.

We preferred the second iteration and had to hand over the designs to the developers to start working on the site. While the rest of the design team worked on the style guide.

Presenting the user with a visual profile, they can see for themselves how they consume energy. We were careful as to not tell people on what to do, but by showing a visual representation of their energy profile, they will get an idea of what consumes a lot of energy. What they do next is up to them, either by changing to a more energy-efficient appliance or by changing their habits a little.

At this stage, I would have liked if we built a mobile version for this site but time was not on our side and had to deliver in time for the presentation.

The Delivery

Alongside the changemakers from GreenRenter, I presented the product to the audience. Although we did not take any prizes for our project, our team were still proud of what we have created in a span of ten hours.

What we hope to achieve from this project is to change people's mindset by letting them understand their energy consumption.

GreenRenter took delivery of this project and it is up to them to build on this project.

Which is harder, changing a mindset?
Or changing behaviour?

The Wrap-up

The next phase for them is to build out a property portal where people can list their property with a sustainability rating. This could give green-minded people a better idea of how 'green' a house is.

Complexities are unavoidable.

Of course this begs the question as to how level a playing field you have here. Some places do not come with certain appliances, while some do. How do you measure this? To simplify this, GreenRenter will have to form a formula to ‘rank’ houses based on certain criteria.

At the end, one of the goals is to have people include sustainability as a factor when looking for places to live.

Key Takeaway:
When presented with the task at hand, first test and validate if that is what your client needs.

GreenRenter‍Encouraging Behavioural Change