Overview
Project Brief
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Chaitanya (Consciousness) is a mobile application that aims to visualize the carbon footprint created in different daily life activities , mainly focused on food consumption & public transportation, and encourage end-users to lower it . This app would help the users learn more about their carbon emissions and help them in achieving a sustainable lifestyle,by making smarter eco-friendly choices .
The Goal
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Climate change is the ultimate effect of large carbon footprints. Greenhouse gases, whether natural or human-produced, contribute to the warming of the planet. Individuals' efforts can greatly contribute to achieving sustainability. Problems that affect sustainability don’t need to be restricted to large companies, in one way or another we all contribute to it. So it is important that at an individual level we must keep a track and monitor our lifestyle.
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Inspiration
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The idea for this project is inspired by the various reputed journals and papers that were referred and is also in alignment with the Climate Action goal, under the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
This project was implemented as part of our college project
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Other Creators
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The Process
1. Research
General Findings
My team and I started off with the research phase where we analysed the following parameters
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Literature Survey : It helped on establishing a familiarity and understanding of current research in Carbon Footprint Calculators and what has been implemented so far through reputed journals and research papers .
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Pre-Development Survey : The pre-application development survey was conducted to gather candid user expectations for a new software application. This information has been used to create wireframes and the initial mock-ups of the app. The mock-ups are used as the basis for the development usability study. Google Forms was used to generate and send a questionnaire survey . Close to 200 respondents provided feedback on commercial carbon generation tracking applications and suggestions for favorable features and here are the survey findings
72 %
Familiarity with the concept of Carbon Footprint
5 %
Monitor Their Carbon Footprint Regularly
80 %
Willing to adapt a Greener Lifestyle
User Persona
The data from the survey and interviews helped us in understanding a general view of our potential users .
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To gain a better perspective of the user , we built personas to recognize the needs and expectations of a variety of users .
2 . Ideation
3. Design
Wireframing
After establishing the features and site map of the application we sketched out a basic wireframe of the app .
Defining The Features
Features included in the app include :​
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Calculation and analysis of an individual’s carbon footprint
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A conversational chat flow using react native chatbot for the onboarding questionnaire.
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Adding a language localisation feature to help the application reach a higher audience in India.
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A discussion forum, event and challenge pages.
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Adding emissions and tracking through weekly and monthly analysis.
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Suggestions to enhance sustainable lifestyle through carbon offset/reduction tips.
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Once the features were established , we created a flow for the app which would show us the relationships of the features and how the user flow would work between pages.
User Onboarding
User Flow
4. Usability Testing
High Fidelity Mockups
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With the help of Maze , a user testing platform we decided to test the prototype with a small group of users to evaluate which variation performs better.
To measure the success of this test we created a few tasks
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Answering the chatbot questionnaire
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Adding an emission and having it reflect in the dashboard
Design Tools Used : Figma , Miro , Milanote Maze - User Testing
Once we were happy with the prototype we continued to code the application using React Native and Firebase to make it into a complete functioning application .
