WasteSort

WasteSort is an all-in-one app that allows users to track their sustainability habits through restaurant dining. Users are able to order food to skip the line, receive advice on how to dispose of their order, and track how much waste they have diverted from the landfill.

This project was created as part of BET 350: Customer Experience Design, a course in the University of Waterloo's Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business.

👥 TEAM

Allen Lu
Hannah Zhong
Kiki Tan
Monica Fang
Nabeel Alam
Tejas Gill

🕑 TIMELINE

Sep 2023 - Dec 2023

🧰 TOOLS

Figma
Canva

📚 DISCIPLINES

Interaction Design
Product Design
UX Research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Design Features
  2. Problem
  3. Initial Sketch
  4. Research
  5. Refinement
  6. Full Prototype

DESIGN FEATURES

Scanned. Sorted. Satisfied.

Sorting your waste and learning about your impact is as simple as scanning your QR code.

Get rewarded for saving the environment.

Earn EcoPoints to be used toward reusable merchandise from your favourite restaurants. Plus, learn how often you need to use the item to offset your environmental impact.

Celebrate your progress.

See how your environmental efforts progress over time, and learn how to further reduce your footprint via curated tips.

Skip the line.

Breeze through those long lines and order directly from the app. Plus, get your waste disposal information without the need for a QR code.

PROBLEM

Canada’s recycling system is broken, with a mishmash of rules that may be different between municipalities and private businesses. Small restaurants and cafes are one example of where recycling may be poorly enforced or nonexistent. Furthermore, the youngest generation often struggles with waste sorting. While Waste Wizards attempt to fix the problem, they increase the cognitive load on the user if they are not comprehensive.

INITIAL SKETCH

For an exercise in BET 350, we were given three lists covering technologies, social issues, and demographics. Our task was to select one item from each list to generate initial ideas.

This gave me the three ideas of Internet of Things, Sustainability, and Small Businesses.

After generating around six sketches corresponding to six ideas, I settled on the idea of a communication service that allows in-person fast food customers to get waste disposal for their order, straight to their table.

RESEARCH

Research methods included auto-ethnography and personal experiences, informal conversations, and secondary research. Whenever we relied on the first two methods, we ensured that there was secondary research to support our specific experiences.

This resulted in both an initial customer profile, and a customer journey map that modelled our ideal user: a young individual who is often too busy to cook at home.
The customer journey map and customer profile both forced us to look at the issue from both the business and customer perspective.

Questions Considered

1. How might we support businesses who may find our solution costly?

✅ Develop online ordering features to provide another source of revenue, and encourage the sale of merchandise through a rewards system. Sustainability ratings can provide good will to a company.

2. How might we help reduce wait times for customers?

✅ Aforementioned online ordering features will also work here too, as customers will not have to wait in line.

3. How might we reduce the cognitive stress that comes from waste disposal?

✅ Alerts can be used to provide pertinent information on waste disposal, while sustainability ratings can give ease of mind that proper practices are being followed.

REFINEMENT

During refinement, I was inspired by the design language of both UberEats and Too Good to Go. This was especially important due to Jakob’s Law---which states that users spend most of their time on other apps, and so your own apps should work the same way as those apps.

FULL PROTOTYPE