Ecobear Case Study

INTRODUCTION

🐻 What is EcoBear?

Ecobear is an online grocery platform that promotes sustainability and guides consumers towards eco-friendly choices, transforming everyday shopping into a greener future.

Eco Bear was created during the IDEO x Invention Corps Designation in Spring 2024, held at UC Berkeley. Out of the 20 teams, our team won 2nd Place.

PROMPT

🤔 HMW

How might we bring the little joys of gentle and emerging tech to empower communities with sustainable living?

How we approached the prompt..

First, my team and I began brainstorming ideas by analyzing key words in the prompt.

Research

🏡 Avg U.S. households emit amounts of CO2 that are significantly above the sustainable target of 2 tons of CO2 per year

🥗 Food systems are the largest contributor to environmental degradation. The production, transportation, and consumption of food on a planet containing over 7 billion people is incredibly carbon intensive

🌾 Organic farms use less energy, and therefore release less carbon emissions, and foster more biodiversity

KEY INSIGHTS

‼️ What did we uncover?

The average household’s carbon footprint is far beyond sustainable limits, indicating the urgent need for low carbon lifestyle

Food systems are a major contributor to environmental harm, yet organic alternatives hold substantial potential in reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Addressing sustainability levels in household through organic alternatives and emerging technology can empower communities to elevate sustainable lifestyles

Problem STATEMENT

🏡 Many households struggle to make sustainable choices or access organic alternatives while grocery shopping, often overlooking the effect on environmental degradation.

This creates a need for a platform where users have easy access to organic products and are incentivized and encouraged to make everyday choices that will lead to reduced carbon footprint.

PROCESS

🌱 Identifying a sustainable living sector

Our research led us to focus on grocery shopping as a sector where we could make a meaningful impact on sustainable living. We recognized that small shifts in consumer choices while grocery shopping would result in significant environmental change, which was an ideal point for the development of our product.

👩‍💻 Integrating an Emerging Technology & Bringing Little Joys to Users

To leverage sustainability through emerging technology, we aim to integrate AI to enhance navigation and overall user engagement. By making use of AI-driven features in our app, we aim to make grocery shopping enjoyable for customers, while they gain incentivized “little joys” for making eco-friendly shopping choices.

Solution

📱 As a result...

We developed an online grocery app that encourages users to make sustainable choices in their everyday shopping, starting with purchasing organic products. Through smart AI features, the app will help users understand their impact on sustainable living while reinforcing eco-friendly habits.

GOAL

🎯 Develop a product that leverages modern technology for better user engagement.

🌎 Making a meaningful and positive impact on both the users and the environment to foster sustainable living

👥 Integrating features and design decisions to encourage little joys for the users by incorporating rewards

FEATURES

🧸 Mascot - BareBear

BareBear is an AI generated digital mascot designed to generate real-time, personalized affirmations based on the user's sustainable choices. For instance, if a user purchases 4 organic produce items, BareBear will calculate the user’s impact and say:

“ Good choice! You reduced how much carbon footprint today! By ____ %”

🎁 Reward Points System

Users will earn 2x reward points for purchasing organic or environmentally friendly products over non-organic items. These points can be then redeemed for discounts or other perks such as free delivery, reusable shopping bags or donations to green initiatives.

This system will help users recognize their contribution to sustainable living and reward them for their shopping choices.

🤖 AI Chatbot

BareBear also functions as an AI chatbot, providing recommendations and answers according to the users’ needs.

❇️ Features Include:

✔️ Suggesting eco-friendly alternatives to specific items/produce.

✔️ Providing insights on the impact of certain products such as low organic vegetables reduces pesticide use

✔️ Answering questions: “What’s the difference between organic and non-GMO?”

🤓 Produce SMART Search Filters

SMART search features will enable users to filter and select items that meet their needs, making it effortless to find organic products, locally sourced produce, plastic-free items, and so on. Additionally, the app will automatically highlight products with badges based on their sustainability impact.

💚 Green = highly sustainable
💛 Yellow = moderate
💔 Red = less eco-friendly

♻️ Recyclable Packaging

All purchases will be packed using 100% recyclable materials to reduce waste.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

INITIAL SKETCHES (LO-FI)

BRANDING

The Shopping Experience

✔️ In the top right section, users can filter items based on shopping preference

✔️ Items are categorized by colors to see level of sustainability

Mascot Pop-Up for Affirmations

When a user makes their first sustainable choice, BareBear will pop up with an encouraging affirmation.

Our goal is to

✔️ Help shoppers recognize their positive impact

✔️ Encourage them to by opting for eco-friendly products

Sustainable Impact Screen

✔️ Users will see a summary of their impact based on their purchases

✔️ This feature turns our abstract sustainability goals into concrete results, at the same time allowing users to recognize their impact

AI Mascot Chatbot

✔️ Users can ask any questions regarding sustainable grocery shopping or specific items within Eco Bear

✔️ This AI mascot - Bare Bear is trained to provide instant and personalized assistance for users to insightfully grocery shop

AI Mascot Chatbot

✔️ Users can ask any questions regarding sustainable grocery shopping or specific items within Eco Bear

✔️ This AI mascot - Bare Bear is trained to provide instant and personalized assistance for users to insightfully grocery shop

CONCLUSION

Learnings and Consequences

My first designation experience was really fun and thrilling. It was also the first time I worked under time constraints and a lot of pressure and in creating a complete product, covering all the steps of the UX processes in just 4.5 hours.

Though our team encountered some challenges, our team work and our collaborative design choices earned us second place in the IDEO x Invention Corps Designation. Given the opportunity, I would love to refine the app’s visual aesthetic, test its functionality and reassess the feasibility of its features in real life.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

🤝 Strategic Work Distribution

I learned the importance of acknowledging each team member’s unique strengths and assigning roles accordingly, especially when working under time constraints. In our team, each person took the lead for different areas - research, branding, creating the mascot, figma prototypes.

Then, we all collaborated to make our design decisions and build upon each other’s work so the final product is cohesive. I believe that our teamwork, open communications of ideas, effective use of our time & strengths, and little laughs here and there were what made us a great team!

⏰ Time Management and Adaptability

Working within the given frame, was quite a challenge for us. With only 3 mins to pitch our product, it was difficult to convey our work process and the solution concisely.

We were running out of time, so we had to quickly adapt and skip a few slides, and we showcased our Figma prototype as our main selling point. Although we skimmed through the key ideas, next time I'll focus on more efficient time management for better presentations.

💡 Different Process

This process differed from my previous projects, where we usually start by identifying a problem before establishing a HMW statement. In this case, the prompt provided a HMW statement without a specific problem, giving us the freedom to create a product of our interests.

This led to a backward process of conducting our own research to identify a problem that we can make an impact on. Overall, this designation gave me new valuable insights on adaptability and collaborative work that I will use in my future projects.