Bing Conscious
Case Study
October 2021
Microsoft Student Hackathon 2021
Project Lead: Ivan Carvalho
Developers: Ivan Carvalho, Sean Roarty, Rick Feng, Connor Doman
User Research
UI Design
Prototype
Whimsical, Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop
Problem:
Being environmentally conscious is expensive, and although researching whether a brand is ethical and sustainable is a search bar away, it is time consuming and tedious to do so.
Research:
I did a few cursory searches on whether websites or databases had a sustainability or ethical practices for various companies. Most of my results were articles on "Top 10 brands", but one website that did catch my eye was goodonyou.eco .
Good On You covered many major clothing brands and chains, such as Zara, and Roots. However, smaller brands (or more local brands) were not available on their database.
How do we bridge the gap between sustainable and ethical brands, to environmentally conscious users?
Constraints:
The platform for the application should primarily be on mobile for portability.
The event was held during the school week, which made meetings difficult to schedule.
Work with brands that were accessible to us at the moment.
Assumptions:
- All articles and sources are unbiased and reliable.
- We have an API link to the database of all brands and their parent companies.
- We have our own established rating system.
Interviews:
I interviewed 13 participants with varying age ranges, most of them between 20 to 24.
Here are the questions I asked:
- How environmentally conscious are you? (1 to 10 being the most)
- Their clothing shopping habits:
- How often do you shop for new clothes?
- How do you buy your clothes (online, instore)?
- How often do you shop from big chain stores?
- How often do you shop for local brands?
- Are you concerned about the environmental impact of your clothes?
- How do you check if your clothes are sustainable?
- How do you check if the company is ethical?
- Their food/groceries purchasing habits:
- How often do you buy food/drinks?
- How often do you buy groceries?
- Where do you get groceries from?
- How do you learn if the food is sustainably sourced?
- How do you learn if the food is ethically made?
- Do you use meal kit subscriptions? If yes, how do you know if meal kits are sustainable, ethical?
After the interviews, I came up with a few conclusions:
85% people said they were environmentally conscious, but only 62% said they were concerned about their impact of their clothing purchases on the environment.
53% of them do not check if their clothes are sustainable. However, 43% of them (from that 53%) were concerned on their impact on the environment. The other 47% who check mainly researched (only 50% do in depth research), checked tags on the clothes or heard from others.
31% do not know if company is ethical. However, 50% of them care about their impact on environment. The other 53% do, where most research on the company, while the others say they do not actively search, but just hears word of mouth / comes across articles on companies.
In summary, though most people claim to be somewhat environmentally conscious, only few of them take in-depth action to find out how the products they buy are actually manufactured, or ethical. Sometimes they won't bother to check unless it's told to them (on packaging / word of mouth / going through social media etc.), or only buy because it's cheap.
Personas -
Based on the findings, I created user personas for the team to reference when we build the application.
Ideation:
For this application, we made the main technology focus to implement Microsoft Azure's Computer Vision Technology, Sentiment Analysis and Text Analytics.
We only had one primary feature, which was to use the smartphone camera, scanning the brand and displaying the results - which were the brand's ratings on sustainability and ethical practice. Below is the flow diagram I came up with:
We later decided to stick with the user taking a photo and scanning for the brand.
Wireframes -
Prototype:
We decided to use React Native for the development of the mobile application.
Initially, I was going to use Microsoft's Fluent design system (to be more aligned to Microsoft), but after researching I decided the next best design system to use was Material UI.
Below are the final mockups:
Identity:
We proposed to add it as a feature, to expand Bing's capabilities as a search engine.
Looking at how the other icons on Bing were, I tried to design an icon similar to the others.
I thought of several color schemes, the top row was more "environmental", the middle was more aligned to the other Bing icons, where red seemed to be similar to "News" and "Shopping" icons.
I settled on the last color scheme as it fit our application's theme better, and it was an unanimous vote for a more obvious "check" mark.
Post-thoughts:
As it was virtual (and very last minute), I wasn't able to do any user testing for the mockups. I definitely wish I did, and wish that we had more team discussion on our design choices.
While putting this together, I found another website (Ethical Consumer, based in the UK) that does what our application does, but limits certain company scores only for their magazine subscribers.
On another note, we were not able to develop the application fully in time. However, we had the code for the computer vision magic to happen. I definitely would have loved a working demonstration of the application, but it was great fun working on it, getting insights and more!