Behavior Design and Sustainability: Green Savior App

At present, people have become so busy with their lives that they don’t have the time to notice what harmful changes our planet is going through. Instead of helping the planet, we damage it even further by polluting the planet and cutting down trees. Moreover, tree planting is significant in restoring the Earth and there are various reasons why trees are not being planted more. So, how can we make planting trees interactive, easy, and entertaining?

As time passes, air pollution has become one of the main concerns in Thailand. According to WHO, PM2.5 in Thailand is 26 µg/m3 which exceeds the recommended maximum of 10 µg/m3. (Greenpeace’s city rankings for PM2.5 in Thailand, n.d.) There are different factors contributing to air quality pollution in Thailand such as manufacturing, vehicle emissions, waste burning, heavy use of vehicles, and deforestation(Deforestation in Thailand. n.d.). Deforestation is responsible for 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Wildfires spread more quickly and burn hotter which releases more harmful pollutants into the air (Alo Moves, 2021). Since 2000, Thailand has lost 2170000ha of tree cover, equivalent to an 11% decrease in tree cover. Furthermore, Bangkok’s car population has increased by 250 percent in recent decades by producing the combustion of gasoline and diesel fuel including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, benzene, and formaldehyde., according to BangkokPost. From the information above, we can conclude that vehicle emissions and deforestation have a huge impact on our current air pollution. Therefore, people need to replant more trees for the environment.

On the other hand, these problems can be reversed or slowed down by planting more trees. Trees are a very important element on Earth because they help to clean the air we breathe, filter the water we drink, and sustain over 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. Forests employ nearly 1.6 billion people, absorb toxic carbon from the atmosphere, and are used in 25% of all medicines. (One Tree Planted, n.d.) In addition, trees also support the fight against global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide, removing and storing carbon, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere.

(More trees please, 2020). Carbon dioxide levels are rising as a result of deforestation and fossil fuel consumption, trapping heat in the atmosphere. (Annika Dean, 2021) Trees help absorb pollution gases such as nitrogen oxides, ozone, and carbon monoxide, as well as dust and smoke, in metropolitan areas. Furthermore, trees play an important role in our carbon sinks. Over a year a single tree can absorb up to 48 pounds of carbon dioxide. Healthy, vigorous trees work as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon and decreasing climate change consequences (Trees in our cities, 2021). So we want to make a change to the community and environment to help people become more aware of air pollution and how we can reduce it.

With all the benefits discussed, we came up with the idea of making tree-planting activities accessible for everyone. We aim to encourage people to plant more trees and be aware of their impact on the environment by making tree planting enjoyable, quick, and easy. For this, we have conducted various types of research to figure out the most effective and interactive design solution. Through our app, we will create a community of people who can actively plant trees while still keeping their daily routine the same. We will measure how many trees are being replanted, show the actual location of the trees, as well as to measure the amount of pollution being cleaned by the trees being planted. Each individual can check their records at any time and plant trees from anywhere.

We are focusing on people from the age of 18 to 40 years old who care about the environment and want to make an impact without disturbing their daily routine.

The personas below are examples of people whom we wanted to target with our solution. As mentioned above, they are people from the age of 18 to 40 years old who are currently living in Thailand which is the current scope of the target group.

Based on the personas above, key touchpoints momo junior can have with our app would include Word of mouth from his friends, social media platforms, and in-game advertisements.

Usually taking public transportation will help Jack find out about our app through advertising at the station or on public transport. Furthermore, Jack can also know about our app from the working place.

Laura discovered our app mostly through social media, which she enjoys using, as well as through news and her office environment.

The main common barrier from these personas is that their daily routines are well defined, leaving little room, time, effort, and energy for inserting green activities into their routine. Moreover, there is also a lack of information and starting point even if they want to engage in tree planting activities. Therefore, how might we design a solution that can fit into their daily life easier while also providing relevant information that they need to know in one place?

After knowing the key environmental issues as well as potential solutions as well as knowing who we want to target and what is stopping them from actually participating in the potential solution, we jumped to ideating various design concepts for a mobile application. Our main objective is to let people engage in planting trees while they travel, in hope of combating the air pollution generated by the use of transportation when people are traveling.

At first, we defined the scope of “Travel” mostly as vacations and holidays, therefore, we began to ideate solutions ranging from apps that let people book a vacation while planting trees, to promoting green tourism and generating financial support for planting trees organizations. Later in the project, our team changed our scope and definition of the word “ Travel “ to a more daily and simple term related to going from one place to another such as going from your home to school or going from our workplace to a mall for leisure activities instead.

This change in direction happened from one of the feedback from our lecturer, suggesting that vacations-related apps are hard to form habits for users to use every day. By actually changing our definition of our key activity, we were able to generate ideas and solutions that are far easier to be used to drive our users to use our app every day. After this, we started to ideate design ideas again, and after getting more feedback from our lecturer, we were able to come up with our final design concept for our app which is called “Green Savior”.

Green Saviors focuses on raising awareness of how much air pollution people generate while traveling and trying to influence people to reduce their use of vehicles and contribute to tree planting activities without breaking their daily routine or lifestyle. Our app lets the users track the estimated air pollution generated using cars, buses, vans, motorcycles and trains through GPS Tracking technology.

Once a day, the amount of pollution estimated will turn into a “Digital Pollution Monster” to which the users will have to defeat to clean up their pollution score and decrease it back to zero. To defeat the pollution monsters, our users must command “Tree Warriors”, which are digital tree characters with different powers, to go into battles and kill off all of the monsters. (Insert a call to battle and battle interface of the app) This aspect of the app aims to promote awareness regarding how daily use of transportation can actually “create” a “monster” that can slowly warm the earth and can only be countered by using trees.

Furthermore, our app also encourages people to engage more in the green types of transportation such as walking as well. The app will track the walking steps of the users and later convert them into coins called “Seed Points” which the users can use to buy accessories and characters to continuously build their tree warriors’ kingdom, preparing for the next, bigger and harder battle.

The core loop is essentially the main repeated series of actions that your users go through every time they use your app or play your game. It is the throbbing core of what makes your game fun, and addicting.

As for the working principle of our game, the first loop starts from expansion, the main action is to clean the carbon dioxide in the air, in which we can fight monsters in the game. After we fight monsters, we will be rewarded with experience (exp) and good items so this is called the Major reward. Hence, the process from major Action to Major Reward is an outer loop that requires a moderate to high investment to build. In short, this is the first loop that includes Expansion, Major Action, and Major Reward. The second loop starts from Expansion to the Main action, in which the Main action we will perform small missions in the dungeon. After completing the mission, it leads to Minor Reward, where we get lower exp and less valuable items than the first loop. However, the process from the Main action to the Minor Reward is an Inner Loop process that takes a lower investment than the first loop. After we level up, get new characters, unlock missions, and get a new dungeon, it will lead us to the challenge of planting our trees where we must invest in procuring and equipping the equipment. including repairing and preserving the warrior’s existing trees. Also, buy warrior plants and collect more items. In addition, we can use Golden or Normal Seed points for investment as well. Moreover, we can convert our money to buy seeds in the game. From connecting with our goals, we can conclude that this game can use your money to plant trees to help reduce the air pollution caused by human vehicular travel.

In terms of revenue, we will use in-app purchases and ads to generate income as we have a game inside the app where people will be able to buy accessories for their characters, as well as new characters, and a part of the earnings, from the financial investments of the players towards the game, will go towards planting new trees.

After getting to know what the main core loop is and how we are using it to make our app addicting and enjoyable for the users to use every day, there is also another design technique that we implemented into our apps such as the Hook Model and Makeit tool.

Make it tool is a list of behavior design principles created by our lecturer, Mr. Massimo Ingegno. The tool aims to help designers incorporate into their product designs to help effectively influence the behaviors of the users to achieve a successful and impactful design. In the process of designing the flow of our application, we tried to insert the principles into our app design as follows:

Make it Immersive and Attractive: From the start of our app, the users will be pulled into a storyline, illustrating how the transportation creates pollution monsters and how the users are the key commander in leading the tree armies to successfully defeating the never-ending pool of monsters. Moreover, the magic world of tree characters and dungeon filled with storyline and themes continues to pull people to immersive with our app as each dungeon will be themed differently according to what type of pollution the dungeon is based upon. One dungeon can revolve around water pollution with fish-like monsters and water tree characters such as the mangrove tree, and another can revolve around air pollution with floating monsters on the clouds. The story and game immersion technique is the backbone of our storyline and concept design for our app.

Make it empowering: During the onboarding process, the users will be asked a question about whether or not they want to help the tree warriors defeat the pollution monsters, the players are empowered to become the main commander of the warriors and the battle tutorial begins.

Make it rewarding: After completing the storyline introduction and tutorial, the users will have to go through a series of tutorials to which they can get rewarded with one real-life tree just and a digital tree warrior just by completing our guide. This was designed to make it rewarding for users to continuously get prizes and gifts which drives them to keep on using our app. On top of that, users will daily get rewards from logging in and generating seed points by walking every day as well.

Make it Value and Meaningful: From playing and investing in building up their tree warriors’ kingdom, clearing the dungeon, and cleaning up their daily pollution battle, the users will be able to generate revenue for our team to which we will use a small percentage of that to plant real-life trees on their behave, granting personalized ownership over the real-life tree to our users. The users, for example, can buy 3 tree warriors to get one real-life tree. They can see their value and real-life impact by checking the condition, location, and general info of their real-life trees as well as the estimated CO2 that their real tree has helped clean on the app as well.

Make it social: After using the app, our users can also access the leaderboard interface where they can check their ranking against their friends based on how many real-life trees they have planted by continuously playing and investing in the app. They can share their real-life world impact with their friends and families on social media as well.

Make it easy: Users who do not want to go into long battles or command their tree warriors in battle can also set the battle system to default to which the warriors will automatically make their move in battle. They can also skip buying real-life trees directly as well.

Similar to the main core loop, the hook model is a design technique that aims to get the users to continuously use our app through a system of triggering people to take action and rewarding them after completion which leads them to invest more in using our product. Various aspects of our design utilized this hook model which can be seen in the following examples of our features:

The external trigger influences the users to walk or cycle by sending out notifications such as “Today is a good day for walking”. Another trigger also comes from the daily air pollution notification. The users will be triggered to be more likely going to walk which in return will get rewarded with seed points which they can invest in saving up the seed points to buy new characters or accessories and items in the game shop.

Upon completing every battle, the users will have to go to the home interface of the app to heal their tree warriors by using various HP potions. The players can also use potions to enhance the power of their warriors before going into battle or equip their warriors with accessories to give them special powers as well. This mechanism will trigger the users to shop and stock more items from the shop, power up their tree kingdom to which they will get rewarded with real-life trees, and the fulfillment of personalizing their tree warriors. In return for getting these rewards, they will invest their money more into playing the game on our app.

We conducted a prototype test with 8 people without telling the instruction and let them navigate through the app. After they are done, we asked them to perform some tasks for us before going on to explain to them about our app and asking them for feedback.

Link to our prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/tCZpHKY0WKTfzNjqDNL1lL/Untitled?page-id=0%3A1&node-id=1%3A1178&viewport=241%2C48%2C0.16&scaling=min-zoom&starting-point-node-id=1%3A1178

We explained the concept to them after they finished and received feedback. Here are the result,

We plan to develop and research further the game mechanic to reach more players. We also plan to develop some design aspects like battle phase background, home page layout, shops layout, more characters, etc. music is an important part of video games so we would like to add background music and sound effects to give the game to make it feel more alive and add to the atmosphere. Other minor things like bugs need to be checked and resolved as well so the app is bug-free and ready for the user.

Throughout the project, we learned and were introduced to a lot of new knowledge, such as how to generate hook models, and customer journeys to study, develop, and design applications based on user preferences and merge the make-it tool to improve the product. As well as making the design to be more impactful to the environment.

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