Eddy Chen
UIUX | Research | Capstone Award Winner
SustainaBUILD analyzes the current packaging consumption of small food-service businesses and recommends sustainable alternatives, informed by current city regulations.
As the UX designer on the team, I worked with PM and Devlopers to build this project from 0 to 1.
Challenge —
Packaging and containers currently account for roughly 28% of all solid waste in the United States. Businesses are not incentivized to transition to sustainable packaging when plastic packaging is cheaper andeasier to access. Now, some cities have already transitioned to require business to only use sustainable packaging, but the issue is those business owners need to find their packaging needs in a completely new industry where they have no connections and no ideas on how to fulfill the packaging requirement.
How might we… help startups and small businesses in the food industry find sustainable packaging abiding by current city regulations so that they can reduce their waste and search time?
My Impact
Delivered full end-to-end functions and collaborated with cross-functional team across all stages, from research, idea validation,design, testing, to website deployment.
Facilitated to build our vision and value/ethics consideration, led user research and design, and defined product framework using animated and interactive prototypes using Figma.
Improved the key feature, allowing the businesses owner totake the quiz and get their result in less than 5 minutes based on the feedback received.
To get the basic idea on what do small businesses consider when it comes to sustainable packaging, we conducted literature review, market research, and 10 user interviews based on the following initial research questions:
We gathered and sorted all the key insights from the research by relevance to five areas: business desirability, packaging cost, supply chain independence, consumer experience, and some forward thinking.
Our main take-aways from the research are:
Desirability
Desire for more accessible sources of sustainable packaging
Consumer Experience
End of life eco friendly packaging is most important to consumers which in turn is beneficial to the companies who use it
Forward Thinking
2⁄3 of consumers consider sustainability when making a purchase
Cost
Difficult to find a balance between costs and environmental impacts, while under logistical pressure
Small Business Owner
Procurement Specialist
Based on the feedback received from 15 user testings, we hope to focus on the following three areas:
Customizing products is actually really difficult and may not be something the business owner wants to tackle
Quiz should take <5 minutes and users want to be able to access a quick snapshot of their results
Showing regional regulations surrounding sustainability and packaging is extremely helpful to the user and should be a main focus
Quiz
This quiz should take businesses under 5 minutes to complete and helps SustainaBUILD offer personalized insights and results for which products to suggest and order.
Recommendation Center
After the quiz, the user is leading to a customized results page with packaging suggestions, where to order them, and other useful information.
Instructions about the key features on landing page for first time users
Quiz is navigable to minimize mistakes
Display of packaging regulations in the local area
Save items for future or mark complete/dislike a category
As my last milestone in undergraduate study, I learned so many lessons from this project. During user research, I particularly focused on how to make interviewees feel comfortable to criticize our project. Keeping the idea at the lowest fidelity during initial testing stage and keep improving and validate the concept as we go. Building a simple design system made communication between our cross-functional team much easier. Overall, we believed there are so many opportunities and benefits for both supply chains and small businesses to use our platform, and we could have expanded the scope to other industries that need packaging and adding more features and improvements to the quiz if time permitted. For further steps, we made our GitHub repository as an open source for future capstone teams to adapt our idea.
The biggest challenge we faced was to reach out local businesses. We utilized many platforms and resources and got 20 businesses to test our prototype. Thanks to all businesses who helped us during this process, and special thanks to Hello Robin, Sweet Alchemy Ice Creamery, UW Sustainability, J's Bicycle Repair and Sales, Sugar + Spoon, Joe Chocolate Company, No Boat Brewing Company, and Luto Vhum for your participation in our interview.
Finally, a big shout out to my awesome teammates, and we were so proud to be nominated for the Commercial Potential Award among 152 Capstone projects in 2022. Here is a snapshot during the award ceremony!
