Hu
Hu was a 5-day design sprint focused on tackling the challenge of addressing food waste through an engaging, student-focused app solution.
Our goal was to design an experience that not only educated students about food waste but also incentivized positive action. By gamifying learning and incorporating features like service hours tracking and competitive challenges, we sought to empower students to make meaningful contributions to their communities while having fun.
The Challenge
High school students face two intersecting challenges: a lack of knowledge about food waste and the need to fulfill service hour requirements for graduation. Opportunities to address both are often inaccessible, unengaging, or fail to create lasting impact.
Our team identified an opportunity to bridge this gap by designing a platform that not only educates students about food waste but also motivates them through tangible incentives like earning service hours and fostering friendly competition among peers.
The Solution
Our solution was Hu, a gamified app experience that empowers students to reduce food waste while earning community service hours. Through features like interactive games, camera-based compost identification tools, and a class leaderboard, we made learning about food waste fun and rewarding.
By integrating progress tracking, rewards, and peer challenges, Hu encourages consistent engagement and reinforces positive habits. The app creates a social, competitive environment that motivates students to take action, learn collaboratively, and see the measurable impact of their efforts.
The Method
To address the challenge of educating high school students about food waste while providing engaging ways to earn service hours, we followed a structured 5-day design sprint process.
Each day focused on a specific phase of design thinking, enabling us to thoroughly explore user needs, generate innovative ideas, and create a solution that aligns with our project objectives.
The Research
We began by gaining a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Through secondary research and exploration of high school education frameworks, we uncovered critical insights about students' challenges, such as the need for engaging educational tools, clear guidance on food waste practices, and tangible incentives like service hour opportunities.
The Problem
Our team found that the primary barriers to engagement include a lack of interactive and accessible tools for educating students about food waste, limited opportunities to earn service hours in an engaging way, and the absence of a platform that combines education with tangible incentives and peer-driven competition.
The Design Challenge
How might we educate public high school students to reduce food waste and make more sustainable choices in their daily lives?
The Market Research
During market research, we analyzed educational apps and gamified platforms that effectively addressed environmental and social issues.
Apps like Duolingo and Khan Academy demonstrated how gamification and rewards could keep users engaged and motivated.
Similarly, Olio and Too Good To Go highlighted the importance of fostering community awareness and creating a tangible impact in reducing waste.
The Norms
We also reviewed educational tools designed for high school students, uncovering a gap in platforms that combined gamified learning with incentives like service hours.
These insights guided our design approach to ensure that the app not only educated users about food waste but also kept them engaged through competitive features like leaderboards and interactive challenges.
The Target
To create a user-centered solution, we synthesized insights from research and ideation. We identified key patterns, such as high school students' lack of awareness about food waste, their motivation to earn community service hours, and their desire for engaging and interactive learning experiences.
By analyzing these recurring themes, we developed Timmy as a representative persona to embody the curious but under-informed high school student.
Creating this persona helped us align our design decisions with real user needs, ensuring our gamified learning platform addressed their goals and motivations while fostering a greater understanding of food waste.
Having established a solid understanding of the problem space, we transitioned into ideation.
Each team member contributed sketches and concepts for potential solutions, including gamified learning experiences, interactive maps for food waste education, and features to track service hours and student progress.
Crazy 8s
Using the Crazy 8s technique, our team quickly brainstormed and sketched key features such as activity maps, leaderboards, and progress trackers for service hours.
This fast-paced ideation method fostered creativity and diverse thinking, helping us identify common themes and innovative approaches to create a gamified, educational app that engages students while teaching them about food waste.
The Decide stage of the design sprint marks a pivotal moment where initial concepts are evaluated and a focused direction is determined for the design.
Using structured techniques such as collaborative brainstorming, prioritization, and constructive critique, we merged diverse ideas to identify the most user-focused and impactful solution.
The Storyboard
Our storyboard illustrates Timmy’s journey as he interacts with the Hu app and learns about food waste.
Starting with a typical day at school, Timmy feels frustration and guilt when he throws away uneaten food and notices how much waste accumulates in the trash.
His awareness grows after a classroom lesson on food waste, sparking curiosity about how he can contribute to the solution.
Encouraged by his teacher, Timmy downloads the Hu app and creates his profile. Through engaging features like interactive challenges, fun learning tools, and friendly competitions with classmates, he discovers practical ways to reduce food waste while earning points that translate into service hours.
By the end of his journey, Timmy feels motivated and accomplished. Tracking his impact through the app’s stats, he gains a sense of pride and confidence in his contributions, making food waste reduction an integral part of his daily routine.
The Solution
Hu is an interactive mobile app designed to engage high school students in addressing food waste through education, gamification, and tangible rewards. The app integrates three core functionalities to create a meaningful and engaging experience:
Educational Learning Tools: Hu empowers students with knowledge about food waste through interactive content, such as videos, quizzes, and real-time AI-powered camera features that help identify compostable and non-compostable items. This hands-on learning approach not only raises awareness but also helps students take actionable steps to reduce waste at home and school.
Gamified Challenges and Leaderboards: To keep students motivated, Hu includes competitive features like peer-to-peer challenges and class leaderboards. Students can earn points for completing tasks, participating in activities, and applying their learning in real-world scenarios. These points contribute to their rankings on the leaderboard, fostering friendly competition and collaboration within their school community.
Service Hour Integration: Understanding that many high schools require community service hours for graduation, Hu connects learning and engagement with tangible incentives. Students accumulate service hours by completing in-app challenges and activities, providing a dual benefit: learning how to reduce food waste and fulfilling their graduation requirements.
The app’s seamless integration of education, competition, and rewards makes it a unique platform for inspiring behavior change among students. By leveraging familiar elements like gamification and social engagement, Hu transforms food waste reduction into an accessible, fun, and impactful journey that aligns with both personal and educational goals.
In the prototyping stage, our team transitioned from initial sketches to developing a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Figma for the Hu app.
This phase allowed us to transform our ideas into a functional design and refine the user experience based on the storyboard and selected user flows.
By utilizing Figma’s collaborative features, we ensured team alignment while iterating on essential elements such as gamification mechanics, educational tools, and the integration of service hour tracking.
The Sign-up Screen
For the Sign-Up Process, the onboarding screen allows students to personalize their experience by choosing a color for their "Hu" avatar.
This customization fosters a sense of ownership and individuality, aligning with the app’s mission of engaging students in a relatable and interactive way.
The vibrant design of the sign-up page captures the youthful energy of the target audience while maintaining clarity and simplicity.
By allowing students to create a personalized avatar, the sign-up process sets a positive tone for exploring the app and emphasizes the message: "The more you know, the more you can unlock."
The Home Screen
The HU app home screen serves as a personalized dashboard, providing students with an overview of their progress and key features.
At the top, users see their grade, customizable HU avatar, and rotating content cards with daily lessons, videos, or stats on food waste to keep them engaged. A progress bar highlights their level, goals achieved, and daily streaks, encouraging continued participation.
Quick navigation tiles direct users to their Journey Map for challenge tracking, Profile for stats and customization, and Leaderboard to compete with peers. The design balances functionality and motivation, fostering a sense of achievement and excitement.
The Features
The journey map serves as a visual representation of student progress, guiding them through challenges with a clear path, level progression, and a progress bar to encourage continued participation.
The library screen complements this by offering a wide selection of educational activities, including interactive games, videos, and quizzes, catering to different learning preferences and ensuring an engaging experience.
The Gamification
The Versus mode introduces a competitive edge, allowing students to challenge peers in identifying compostable items, fostering collaboration and making environmental education exciting and memorable.
The camera identification feature, integrated with HU Chat, empowers students to interact with real-world food waste by receiving instant guidance and fun facts, turning everyday scenarios into impactful learning moments.
The Profile & Leaderboard
The profile provides students with an overview of their progress, showcasing metrics such as earned service hours, XP points, level achievements, and daily streaks.
This feature inspires continued engagement by allowing users to visually track their impact & goals, fostering a sense of accomplishment.
On the final day of our design sprint, we concentrated on testing our prototype to evaluate its functionality and improve the user experience.
By gathering peer feedback and making iterative refinements, we ensured the design met student needs and aligned with the project's objectives, setting a solid foundation for future user testing.
The Testing
After presenting our prototype, we conducted peer testing to uncover usability issues and validate our design approach.
The feedback revealed opportunities to enhance clarity and engagement in specific features, prompting us to revisit key elements like the gamification flow and user onboarding.
By addressing actionable insights, we refined the prototype to create a more intuitive and impactful experience, ensuring it effectively met the needs of high school students and aligned with our sprint objectives.
The Results
With the insights gathered from peer testing and a focus on iterative improvements, our team advanced from an initial concept to a fully functional prototype.
This refined version incorporated validated changes, such as clearer navigation, enhanced gamification flows, and a more engaging onboarding experience.
By aligning the design with student needs, we ensured that the app was intuitive and motivating, providing clear pathways for users to explore content, earn points, and achieve service hours.
The final prototype successfully balances educational goals with interactive features like camera-based food recognition and competitive games, ensuring that users not only learn about food waste but also feel incentivized to take action.
This cohesive, user-centered solution meets both the educational and motivational needs of high school students while addressing the core objective of tackling food waste through fun, accessible technology.
The Key Learnings
Gamification Enhances Engagement: Introducing gamified elements, such as leaderboards, competitive challenges, and progress tracking, proved to be a strong motivator for students. This highlighted the effectiveness of combining education with interactive play to drive sustained user participation.
Intuitive Design Supports Learning: Crafting a seamless user interface with clear navigation and visually engaging elements ensured that students could easily interact with the app. This reinforced the importance of intuitive design when targeting younger audiences with educational tools.
Incentives Drive Action: Aligning the app with students’ real-world needs, like earning service hours for graduation, created a tangible incentive for users to engage. This demonstrated the value of addressing practical motivations to inspire behavior change.
Iterative Refinement Strengthens Solutions: Regular peer feedback and testing were essential for refining the prototype. This iterative approach validated the app’s features and underscored the importance of collaboration in creating user-centered solutions.
Empathy Shapes Impactful Designs: Developing Timmy’s persona and storyboard brought the problem space to life, highlighting student struggles with food waste and motivation. This user-centric focus helped ensure the final design addressed real challenges in an engaging and relatable way.
The Next Steps
Define Success Metrics: Collaborate with educators and school administrators to establish key performance indicators (KPIs), such as app usage rates, service hours earned, leaderboard activity, and knowledge retention about food waste. These metrics will help evaluate the app’s educational and motivational impact over time.
Iterate Based on User Feedback: Analyze the data gathered from testing and refine features accordingly. For instance, adjust the level progression in the journey map, fine-tune the competitive aspects of the leaderboard, or enhance the clarity of educational content based on user behavior and feedback.
Explore Accessibility Enhancements: Ensure the app is inclusive by testing for accessibility compliance, particularly for students with different learning styles or needs. Add features like voice-over descriptions, adjustable text sizes, or visual aids to make the app more universally usable.
Integrate Advanced Gamification: Explore additional gamified elements, such as seasonal challenges, collaborative team competitions, or achievement badges, to sustain engagement and encourage long-term usage among students.
Strengthen School Partnerships: Collaborate with schools to implement the app as part of their curriculum or extracurricular programs. Offer training for teachers on integrating the app into their classrooms to maximize its impact.
Plan for Scalability: Investigate how the app can expand to include broader environmental topics, such as recycling or water conservation, while maintaining its core focus on food waste. Develop strategies to scale the app’s adoption across different school districts or even nationally.
Introduce Personalized Experiences: Consider integrating personalization features, such as individualized learning paths or tailored content recommendations based on a student’s progress and interests, to deepen engagement and make the app experience more impactful.