Summary
My team created a clickable app prototype via Figma that enables you to lower your carbon footprint by booking flights sorted by the lowest amount of CO2 emissions. We did this by hypothesizing an assumption for the modern traveler, proto-persona and iterated persona creation after user interviews and surveys, defining the problem, ideating a solution with a specific feature set and critical path, and ending with prototyping, user testing, and iteration.

Problem
Aviation's climate problem
Our solution: making carbon footprint reduction easy for air travelers
Our app, Footprint, was built to encourage travelers to reduce their carbon footprint by booking flights based on the lowest CO2 emission.
Audience
Well Informed, Wanting Change

Characteristics
- Aware and well-informed on climate change issues
- They take active steps to reduce their carbon footprint where they can
- They find it difficult and tedious to keep track of their carbon footprint on a regular basis
- Tech-savvy
- Travels a lot for work so they feel an internal conflict when it comes to air travel
- Some even completely cut out flying to reduce the global impact
Process
The Prompt — Build a clickable prototype and present case study - in two weeks
My Contribution
- User research testing
- Discovering the problem
- Ideating a solution
- All visual design and interactive elements
- User testing and iteration
Constraints & Roadblocks
- School project
- Small scope and timeline
Week One —
Uncovering a problem
Our team was given the prompt to create an app for the modern traveler. Given the broad scope, we prepared interview questions to conduct user interviews and surveys hoping the survey data would make apparent the problem needing to be solved.
User survey

User interview tidbits

We condensed the collected interview data and found climate change to be a topic of concern for multiple interviewees. There is an internal conflict of wanting/needing to travel but also being aware that most travel methods, flying in particular, are harmful to the environment.
Affinity mapping

How can we fly and reduce our carbon footprint?
- Fly non-stop
- Choose your flight based on the type of fuel
- Fly coach
- Fly cold, if possible
- Purchase carbon offsets
One hope is that airlines would be forced to change the way they operate because of consumer behavior to reduce their carbon footprint.
Competitor analysis

We defined 3 design requirements for our app:
- Focus on discoverability
- Build trust with transparent data
- Utilizing whitespace to avoid overwhelming the user
Problem statement and brainstorming feature set

Prioritizing features

Week Two —
Storyboarding

Proposition statement

We focused on only building the critical path for the user: booking a flight. Our key feature set included providing a footprint score with transparency on how it’s calculated and tracking the flights against a user’s carbon footprint.
Lo-fi prototype

Mid-fi prototype

We iterated based on user testing by:
- Simplifying the amount of content in the onboarding screens
- Clarifying graphical data
- Making the carbon footprint number more obvious while choosing a flight
Outcome
Hi-fi prototype
