Green Exchanger
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Project Overview
Motivating hotel guests to pursue a greener stay.
Green Exchanger is a consumer green service that provides hotel guests with the experience to make greener decisions. Through the opportunity to customize and manage the toiletries that come with their hotel room, guests participate in an incentive program that rewards green exchange decisions while allowing them to become more eco-conscious of their actions.
01
Gain points by customizing which toiletries you don’t need the hotel to provide in the room
02
Interactive reward system that increases customer participation in the program
03
Use points to redeem rewards in the hotel while motivating guests to think more critically about their plastic consumption
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Problem Space
Today, there are many hospitality corporations shifting to more sustainable practices that eliminate single-use plastics from their hotels. While conscious shift are being taken to become more environmentally mindful, there are still millions of single-used toiletries that end up being discarded, contributing to the global issue of plastic pollution.
Amenity creep is happening as hotels are spending more than expected on toiletries with the increase of the competitive standard of hotels.
Companies are beginning to recognize their environmental impacts and are actively trying to integrate sustainable practices into their business models.
Some travelers are aware of the environmental consequences that come from toiletry waste and want to help, but ultimately fail to do so due to the many hurdles that come along way.
There is still great reliance on non-sustainable items and services due to habitual behaviors and the inconvenience of travelling with toiletries, despite the sustainable social movements.
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User Research
After performing user interviews with six constant travellers who often find themselves staying at hotel, we discovered three consistent key pain points that we want to address in our solution.
What's stopping hotel guests from traveling green?
Addressing Key Points
Limited knowledge on sustainable practices
Due to the lack of knowledge and information spread, users are unaware of the impacts of single-use plastics as well as unsure what are the best and easiest ways for them to practice sustainability.
◎ Provide easy access to information on the impacts of toiletry waste that allow quick and effortless decision making
◎ Send the user an annual report of their overall impact from participating in the service
People perceive their actions as unimpactful
Due to the lack of knowledge and information spread, users are unaware of the impacts of single-use plastics as well as unsure what are the best and easiest ways for them to practice sustainability.
◎ Quantify their green decisions to show that they can make a difference
◎ Provide simple visuals that show how their change in practice has had an impact on both the environment as well as how the hotel operates
Lack of motivation or incentive to act
There is a general lack of motivation and incentive to act even with the growing trends of sustainability as the users don’t want to sacrifice their convenience as well as the barrier to practice greener to be high.
◎ Provide a reward incentive system that help introduce greener practices
◎ Accumulation of points to reach certain levels to incentivize continuous participation
◎ Provide resources and guides on how to pack and travel with toiletries
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Ideation & Concept
After we defined the opportunity gap and product requirements, we did several rounds of ideations and narrow down to one concept.
First Round Concept
Green Exchanger 1.0 is a machine placed in a hotel corridor where you could choose to return your unused toiletries provided in the hotel bathroom, and get rewards of unique services.
This service encourages travelers to bring their personal items instead of using disposable ones. This could benefit the customers by helping reduce their carbon footprint, which also benefit hotels by reducing their spend on amenities as well.
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Feedback Session
With the paper and pen drawings, we did some role play and think-alouds with six different travel lovers to go through the concept. They gave us some valuable feedbacks. From this, I revised the features based on the feedback
With those concerns, we looked back on the user flow, and found some problems with the “vending machine“ service:
So we refined the service
All those problems are caused by the service platform- ”vending machine.” We changed our platform for this exchange service from the vending machine to the transactional email service. The users will receive an email after they book the hotel to be informed of the service, which solves many of the problems that we were facing.
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Service Blueprint & User Journey Map
After we decide to use the digital services to enhance the experience, I developed the user journey map with the service blueprints to make sure it would work well for the business model.
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Interface Ideation
After finalizing features, I started the prototyping process by first quickly sketching out ideas/screens/user-flow on papers. It’s preferable to test paper prototypes before moving to mid-fi digital prototypes. However, the key problem that I am trying to solve here is the information overload. With relatively lower data/content fidelity, paper prototypes cannot paint the whole pictures for users and thus I cannot get valuable insights from users. I decided to push another round of iteration based on internal stakeholders feedback and build the mid-fi digital interactive prototype.
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User Testing
Testing Mid-Fidelity Prototypes Reveals Multiple Problems
With mid-fi prototypes, I conducted a think-aloud + semi-structured interview with target users to collect feedback.
Iteration 1: Transient Navigation VS. Persistent Navigation
The first prototype has the “off-canvas“ design which the cards can be swiped right or left. I thought that this interaction would be interesting for users to play around. But the feedback shows that users need the menu to be always visible for quick access. Also, the categories have status indicators. So I change the cards design to the springboard pattern.
Iteration 2 Toggle Switch VS. Checkbox
The toggle switch makes user confused. I realized that sometimes the toggle switch gets difficult to understand whether the switch is showing state or action. Also for setting conformation, checkboxes are preferred when an explicit action is required to apply settings.
Iteration 3 Interaction Improvement
During the think-aloud activity, I found that the possibility that user changed their decision to get more reward is higher than I expected. Also, I found that they spent sometime doing the calculation to get the right point for the reward. To reduce the mental effort and make thinking faster, I change the wizard bar and give more information about the reward to influence the decision making.
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Mid-Fidelity Prototype
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Final Interface
