The Ocean

CleanUp

The Task

As part of a Design Sprint challenge, my teammates and I were tasked to re-design the website or mobile app of an existing charity site.  With a passion for tackling environmental issues that try to incorporate ways to connect individuals to the making of consumer products, I was passionate about pursuing the challenge of redesigning the Ocean CleanUp's website for clearer messaging of their fantastic initiative, and ways people can help. 

Timeline: 1 week  |   3 UX designers  | My role: UI designer / copywriter / researcher

Introduction to the Ocean CleanUp

The Ocean Cleanup is an initiative that aims to cleanup 90% of the floating ocean plastic pollution using advanced technologies they have developed. 

To do this, the Ocean Cleanup targets the pollution sources, which primarily start from rivers in addition to the existing plastic pollution accumulated in the ocean. They recycle part of the plastic pollution to make sunglasses. 100% of proceeds from the sunglasses will go back towards cleaning the ocean.

*Getty Images /Cyrill-Gutsch

 Ocean & River Pollution Research

400M

1.15 -

2.41M

1000

5T

metric tonnes of plastics are produced annually

metric tonnes of plastic enter the ocean each year

rivers alone emit close to 80% of this pollution 

pieces of plastic currently litter in the ocean

Initial Insights & Analysis

Following a close analysis of the original website, the team and myself had found a few key areas for improvement.

Information Architecture / Transparency ––  The Ocean CleanUp had a great deal of information on its site about the initiative and it’s transparency of where donation dollars go - a feature we discovered was unique for a charity to mention. However, these details were buried under pages of text and hidden behind tabs.  Thinking critically, we found it would be effective to have the most important information more easily accessible and transparency of donation allocation to the cause to also be important to have highlighted.

Interview Insights & Problem Space

In this process, we interviewed 5 individuals who have previously donated to a charity.

We found that showing transparency and honesty were important factors when making a contribution to a charity or social enterprise.  We also found that understanding how the organisations work and seeing how a donors money impacts the initiative were also important.  Interviewees also said they were less inclined to donate if they perceived that the charity had a lot of overhead costs.

How Might We...

...provide transparency to potential donors before they make a contribution in order to reassure them that their money is being used directly to the cause?

Inspiration & Design Decisions

Persona

Derek Lee  |  Remote Web Developer  | 32

outdoor sports enthusiast, surfing

concerned about the increase in plastic pollution in oceans and river 

Derek is a passionate adventure seeing outdoor sports enthusiast. He spends a few hours a day surfing, running on the beach when he’s not working as a remote web developer. He loves nature and it breaks his heart when he encounters mounds of trash in the ocean while he surfs or when he sees dead wildlife washed up on shore with a belly filled with plastic. He was recently recommended social initiatives to help clean the plastic ocean pollution on Instagram. After coming across the ocean cleanup he was instantly impressed to see he could help by buying a pair of sunglasses (something he needed) that was made of the very plastic that was collected from the ocean. 

User Testing & Insights

Our team interviewed 3 users to understand the ease of use between the initial and second version. 

The feedback received from user testing provided some really interesting insights which I have outlined below:

• Our users really like the UI aspect and how cohesive it is. It truly shows the branding of this initiative in our initial prototype.
  
• However, one major improvement is the “learn more” button not being catered towards the page it will lead to, which has caused some confusion during our user testing. So we changed the text on the button which will clear up the confusion. We also made some changes to the UI such as reshaping the pill bubble and moving the text around so that it fits better on the page while scrolling.

Final Prototype

Next Steps?

So, what are our next steps? In the future we would like work on:

• adding a review page and our donor’s sustainability stories to show more impact
  
• adding a transparency report page for a detailed breakdown of the costs and proceeds, as well as the report from informed giving websites like “Charity watch” 
• adding other product pages besides the sunglasses