Carboncash
Shopping assistant that helps everyday consumers go green
Role –
Visual and interaction design
Team –
Antonio Song, Elena Deng, and Judy Chun
Tools –
Figma, Principle
Timeline –
6 weeks
Project Overview
Steering everyday consumers to pursue a more green purchase behaviors
CarbonCash is a green consumer app that makes your everyday green purchase decisions easier than ever, with diverse set of environmental metrics for everyday consumer products, and a financial incentive program that rewards green purchase decisions.
Problem Space
Can we close the action-intention gap through financial incentives or environmental impact information?
To steer our society into a more environmentally-friendly direction, a collective fusion of individual efforts is key. However, one of the biggest hurdles in this transition is the “intention-action gap” - while many people have the intention to go green, the action conversion rate is significantly lower. According to a HBR survey, 65% said they want to buy purpose-driven brands that advocate sustainability, yet only about 26% actually do so — a classic example of an intention-action gap.
User Research
Insights from interviews
After performing user interviews with 6 students of diverse age (19-27), we discovered three areas of key problem areas that CarbonCash could address.
Limited knowledge / access
People don't go green primarily People don't go green primarily because of their limited knowledge of going green.
Lack of Motivation
Not enough motivation to green as the results of their individual actions are not clearly visible.
Financial pressure
Regular consumers felt that going green feels more expensive when it's not always the case.
Ideation
How might we nudge the everyday consumers to garner green purchasing habits?
We came up with several core features that would capture the opportunity spaces that we’ve identified such as:
AR Scanning
AR scanning feature that reveals easily digestible environmental information for informed purchase decisions.
Community Impact
Track your individual contribution to your community through an interactive map and a real-time activity feed.
Reward Program
Reward program that offers rewards for items with high environmental rating. Track reward and spend them in participating stores.
Final Design
Rewards, stores, products,
and community
The dashboard features reward information such as CC points, list of products and partnering stores, and community ranking.
Review your weekly and monthly performance
Keep track of your overall CC score, which reflects your green purchase habits, and CC points that can be used towards your future purchases.
View your community's ranking
Clear visualization of your individual contribution on a larger scale.
See the impact you bring to your community
Feel motivated to keep up your green habits by engaging with the people in your community.
Seamless shopping experience
Browse and select from a comprehensive list of partnering stores.
Comprehensible environmental information
Make informed purchase decisions with comprehensible environmental information reduced down to a simple CC Rating system.
Shopping Cart that gives an overview of the CC points and CC scores you will earn from the transaction.
The shopping cart gives an overview of the the subtotal and the quantity of the items added. If the user wishes to delete an item from their shopping cart, they can simply swipe left to revel the red delete button.
Real-time product comparison with AR scan
Scan barcode of the products to view environmental information real-time.
Takeaways
Aligning my personal expectations of the final deliverable with the team
As each of us came from various discipline, we came into the project with a very different expectations of the final deliverable in terms of the level of fidelity and the level detail. We faced a challenge aligning the right level of research fidelity, as I believed we needed more time to work on the actual designing than spending time on in-depth research since we already have gathered valuable insights from the preliminary interview.

As a result, we discussed as a team and was able to realign our individual expectations by collaboratively coming up with a project roadmap that made sense for all of us.