From the outset, my team and I wanted to focus on building something to address a wide-ranging social issue. Our initial Miro meeting focused on finding a issue that gave us an interesting direction to start our research. After mind-mapping potential topics of interest, we decided to focus on e-Waste as it is an increasing problem in Aotearoa / New Zealand, and one that was very relevant to us as digital designers. We did this by outlining our collective values (green), identifying problem spaces (red) and the needs and wants within those spaces (yellow), and finally potential solutions to those problems (blue).
Investigating the issue of e-Waste required further direction, and so our second Miro session focused on empathy mapping to connect and link problems within the e-Waste space and solutions outlined in our prior meeting. From these links, further considerations were outlined, and addressed in turn (orange and blue).
From this, we outlined ideas that we found interesting and worthy of further investigation. (lime green)
Our final Miro session focused on finding and incorporating research about how e-Waste is generated and where our solution could intervene / what form our solution would take.
A major consideration here was deciding to make our solution a product, such as an application on a smartphone, or a service which would be more customer-focused and educational. We eventually decided to meld the two into a service offered through a product. Again, empathy mapping was used to find relationships and contrasts between concepts and ideas.
We had the product, now we needed to figure out who would potentially use it.
As mentioned, government-led initiatives such as the e-Day collections and the TV takeback campaign have not provided actionable day to inform future decision-making in this sector. We considered this when outlining our key stakeholders. We needed a broad enough cohort for product uptake, while keeping it narrow enough to keep the product, it's brand and message focused.
We arrived at three key stakeholders. Broadly speaking, these are 1. donors 2. recipients, and 3. business partners of our product.
From these stakeholders, we derived our information architecture and sitemap to include the functionality required by these parties. The functionality we outlined from our initial market validation research was also included as an additional set of pages, focusing on providing information to the user, if requested.
From this IA, we were able to start work on the wireframes and mockups.
The initial mockups incorporated the colour scheme of the wider product brand. These mockups were used to gather a final round of feedback before submission.
Feedback we received from our peers suggested the blue background present on all of the screens suggested it was too garish, and would impair already visually-impaired users. The colour was derived from the Windows Blue Screen of Death, a common occurance in end-of-life Windows devices, and this association was also picked up on in feedback. However, the association it created was fear / suspense that the product would not work effectively or that it was parodying the consumerist cycle of buying-breaking-replacing.
I took this feedback and made adjustments to the coloration, while keeping the overall structure and layout the same. This gave us the endpoint for this particular project.
