Use this page to collect your initial thoughts about issues to be addressed in your Elevator Pitch. Plesae jot down a few ideas in each of the follow sections.
Adoptability
- What are the considerations that will affect peoples’ decisions about whether to adopt and use your design idea.
- Whether they will remember to take a picture of their sustainable action
- Whether they will remember to upload the action onto the platform
- Whether the action is verified on the app
- Are there potential barriers that will slow down adoption, or that you’ll need to overcome.
- There will always be people who want to game the system, this will be a huge challenge to overcome if and when the marketplace is up and running.
- The process of making a habit of taking pictures of sustainable actions
- The process of making people proud of the sustainable actions they are taking regardless of how big or small of an impact it causes (Small drops make an ocean mentality has to be cultivated)
- What aspects of the existing situation will need to change?
- The biggest problem that individuals face with taking sustainable actions is that they feel demotivated because they don’t how much they contribute to the bigger picture of achieving the SDGs
- The fear of forgetting to take a picture of the action is also high. We need to make sure that our messaging doesn’t put pressure on recording your sustainable action.
- The fear regarding how well the picture will describe the action is also high.
- The fear of making sure that the picture looks good is also another aspect that will worry people who identify with certain aspects of the character profile of Social Media Susie.
Pricing Model
- What’s the pricing model for your idea?
- Depending on the features that the user wants like generating a report that verifies the amount of impact that is made by the user, accessing the marketplace or building partnerships with the organisations that have partnered with Global Impact.
- We want to test out the amount that people are willing to pay for a subscription for advanced features but the basic version will always be free like Instagram.
- I also don’t believe in selling the user data for profit, therefore we will be adopting a NO ADS policy.
- The main revenue is expected to come from the organisation through a licensing fee and a number of users-based subscription costs.
- Is there an upfront cost? Or a subscription cost?
- The amount we want to test is $1.99 dollars per month and $0.99 per month. I’m a firm believer that it shouldn’t be expensive to learn about the impact the user is creating through their sustainable actions! The users are already doing such a big favour to Mother Earth!
- There is no upfront cost for the individual user!
- Are there any rebates or other financial incentives that will help lower the cost and reward the behaviour?
- There is a marketplace that incentivises the exchange of points for vouchers.
- Another method of reward would be through the accumulation of GIS (Global Impact Score)
- Another method of validating sustainable behaviour is through social media media features like likes and comments!
Sustainability Impact
- How does your design idea improve sustainability?
- Global Impact encourages individuals to take simple actions towards sustainability. If every individual takes just 1 sustainable action like having a meat-free meal or carpooling or recycling, the world would progress towards sustainability a lot faster and the journey towards sustainability a lot easier!
- My idea also promotes a lifestyle change towards being more sustainable and mindful about their daily activities!
- How big is the problem now? What’s the baseline that you’ll compare your idea to?
- There is no centralised platform that tracks and measures the impact of individuals. Our aim is to make the journey towards sustainability a sustained and a fun one!
- I think we can use the metrics used by social media platforms like number of shares, number of likes, number of posts, etc. The baseline is something that I am still struggling to establish the sustainability metrics!
- What delta will this make? How can you quantify or measure the impact of your design idea? And how big a difference could your design idea make?
- One of the metrics that we should be using to track the platform's success is through the number of daily active users, the amount of impact recorded on our platform and consistent check-ins with the users to iterate the product so that it is more usable.
Competitive Advantage
- What else is available to your users now? What options do they have?
- There are calculators that could predict the impact the users create with their sustainable actions
- Are there other products or services that promise similar results?
- Yes there are a few services that works similarly but it customised with organisations in mind, not individuals.
- A few examples are Carbon reform, Atlas Metrics, Atrius, Benchmark GenSuite, Brightest IO
- How do you compare to them?
- The differentiating factor is that Global Impact is built with placing individuals at the forefront.
- The impact calculated is customised according to geographic location and geographic consumption.
- We understand that there is social aspect to taking habitual sustainable actions, therefore we have tried to reward that behaviour through social validation and gamification!
Use of Design Thinking / Human-Centeredness
- How does this design idea address the essential need identified in your POV statement?
- Global Impact directly tackles this need by quantifying the sustainable actions through tangible metrics.
- In terms of incentivising the user or rather empower the user to take more actions, we have a social media aspect to the platform. Garnering attention from like minded people has been tested to encourage users to record their sustainable actions over a long period of time.
- How did your design idea evolve based on the steps in the design thinking process? (Observing > Interviewing > Defining a POV > Ideating > Prototyping > Testing > Interating)
- Obeservation
I noticed that people were feeling very demotivated to take sustainable actions because they couldn’t find like-minded people and they weren’t able to quantify their sustainable actions.
- Interviewing
During the interview process, I made an active effort to empathise with the interviewee so that I can look at the problem from their shoes. It was important to me understand holistically the roadblocks they were facing when they were taking sustainable actions.
During the interview process, I was also trying to figure out what the user would value the most. I found that there were very different opinions amongst the people I noticed. I found that the young people (under the age of 30) would be highly incentivised when there is monetary aspect to taking sustainable actions. But people older than 30 were reluctant about bringing monetary incentive into the picture.
I also realised that some of my questions had an inherent bias in them which everybody wants to take sustainable actions. I felt like that influenced the answers that I was getting from ym interviewees
- Character Profiling and Defining a POV
During the character profiling, I found it extremely useful in determining my target market for my future interviews. I realised that when I thought about all the different profiles, I could identify with atleast some of the aspects of almost all the different character profiles I wrote. This realisation made me think that there might be an inherent bias in the way that I think or ask questions.
Defining the POV statement was initially challenging for me because I was not able to decide what exactly were the needs of the users. But once I went back to my interview notes, I was able to understand and remind myself of the needs of the user and was able to define the POV statement
- Ideating
Findings : During the ideating process, I found myself drawn to the idea of divergent and convergent thinking. I felt that when there was a time pressure on the divergent thinking, I found that I had more ideas that I came to my mind. I also found that I took more time with convergent thinking as I wanted to think about the feasibility of the divergent thinking ideas deeply.
- Prototyping
Global Impact is a Minimum viable product that tracks, measures and showcases the sustainable actions taken by individuals. It follows a data algorithm that provide tangible impact metrics of the sustainable action.
- Testing
During the testing, I realised that some of assumptions that I made were not proven to be true. The more I tested my hypothesis, the more I learnt about my target market. For example, I thought monetary incentivising would work for people in all walks of life. But I learnt that there is vast majority of people who aren’t motivated by the monetary incentives.
- Iterating
During the iteration process, I’ve realised that constant reworking makes a world of difference for the product. For example, initially we planned on GIS to be just dependent on factors like time taken to the complete the sustainable action, number of SDG indicators the action contributes to. Through the iteration process, we added the factor like amount of impact the action made, amount of effort required for the action, etc.
What’s the Roadmap?
- Is there an path of future development that could evolve from and extend your design idea?
It can evolve into full fledged data capture towards sustainability for individuals. It also has the capacity to
- How could your design idea grow?