Needs Analysis

What problem are you proposing to solve?

It is currently very difficult for consumers to compare companies based on their carbon footprint or other ESG (environmental, social, governance) metrics. If an individual wants to purchase a product or make an investment decision, they are not well informed on how each of the companies available to them practice environmental, social, and governmental responsibility.

Who matters?

This matters for individuals who care about (or can use) sustainability and ESG factors. Examples of would include climate activists and sustainably-minded individuals; generally, people who have the extra disposable income to spend on the cost of being sustainable, and people who care deeply about the future of the environment are the people who experience this problem the most. These personas are represented by Techno Todd and Activist Amy, shown below.

Techno Todd is representative of people who can afford the luxury of purchasing more environmentally-friendly products and services, even if they are more expensive. Unlike a more price-conscious consumer, Todd is willing to pay a premium if it means his purchases better align with his values. Todd is sustainably-minded due to his surroundings and upbringing, and this is reflected in his personal habits. Todd probably won’t go out of his way to obtain data from individual companies, but would appreciate the help of a platform that makes it easy to choose where to purchase from.

Activist Amy captures the young, driven demographic that is worried about the future of the planet if substantial changes aren’t made. Amy is concerned about the amount of misinformation on the internet, and wants to see large corporations held accountable for the amount of waste they put into the environment. While she might not have significant sway with her consumer spending, she would support a platform that encourages and empowers people to choose more eco-friendly companies to buy from.

Poorly-informed Penelope is an important persona, even if she is not as deeply interested or committed to sustainability and ESG. While she isn’t as knowledgeable of sustainability, she has the broad understanding that it is generally a good thing. She picked this up from her experience living in Portland, where her neighbors and friends are frequently emphasizing their sustainable lifestyles. She too, wants to make the world better, but doesn’t see a clear path towards how. Importantly, she is also highly price conscious. She won’t pay extra for sustainable/responsible products, but she might opt for a more sustainable option in the edge-cases where two products are otherwise identical in function and price. However, she has struggled to identify what is really green vs “greenwashing,” and struggles to make informed decisions about sustainability.

There is also a subset of the population that we might not be able to design for; these people include active climate deniers and those who are simply apathetic about sustainability, despite their knowledge of climate change. We have captured these people in the anti-personas Denier David and Apathetic Luisa, shown below. We intend to use these anti-personas to identify their needs or concerns, and how they might be impacted by our solution. However, we don’t intend to focus on their needs while developing our solution.

Denier David is someone who is not looking for a solution to climate change. He is financially incentivized to deny climate change, and is not making ever-day decisions based on sustainability. Even with sufficient data, he doesn’t want to believe it, and doesn’t see it as an issue, or something worth caring about.

While Apathetic Amelia is well educated and highly knowledgeable about sustainability, she is very apathetic about how her decisions affect the environment. For Amelia, her priorities are to keep herself and her family happy and healthy. Sustainability does not play a major role in this equation, and is not a major consideration (if at all) when she makes decisions and consumer purchases. With her friends, she can hold a conversation about sustainability, but doesn’t care to practice it much within her own life as it’s too much work, and she doesn’t think it’s her responsibility. Instead, she believes the obligation to practice ESG falls on companies.

How do your Prospective Users think about this Problem/Activity?

For people like Techno Todd, this problem is one that can get in the way of their ability to make sustainable choices. Todd has an eco-friendly mindset and is willing to pay extra to make the right choice; however, making the most sustainable choice is not Todd’s utmost priority, and if it becomes too difficult to find good-quality and easy to parse data, Todd will probably turn to an easier to find alternative, even if it is not eco-friendly. Todd’s motivation and mindset mainly comes from his surroundings and upbringing, so making a worse choice in the interest of saving time likely wouldn’t affect him too much. However, a solution to the problem of not being able to quickly compare the carbon footprint of companies would make Todd feel good about himself with minimal work on his part.

On the other hand, users like Activist Amy wouldn’t hesitate to take on the extra research if it means taking business away from large companies that are harming the environment. The key feature that Amy sees value in is the ability to empower everyone to make the same choice, since many people shifting to more sustainable options puts more pressure on harmful companies; Amy would like to see a way to bring these findings to the masses, assuming the information is presented in an easy to understand manner that is free of misinformation.

In a way Poorly-informed Penelope interacts with this problem everyday, even if she doesn’t know it. She LACKS information about sustainability, meaning that she can’t make decisions informed by sustainability/ESG, even if she wanted to. She is well meaning, albeit uninformed, so she doesn’t seek out this information either. As a price-conscious consumer, her priority is to save money where she can. If she has two identical options, one of which she believes is more sustainable, she will choose the more sustainable option. However, she does not go out of her way to pursue sustainable consumer or investment decisions.

Denier David and Apathetic Luisa don’t interact with this problem on a daily basis. Denier David is likely to seek out our solution to this problem and search for flaws so that he can back up his own argument that the climate crisis is an overreaction. As a supporter of oil, gas, and coal corporations, David seeks data that supports his worldview. Apathetic Luisa is unlikely to seek out a solution to this problem on her own, but when confronted with two equally-priced goods, she may choose the more sustainable option.

What requirements must your solution satisfy? (think about different stakeholders)

Our solution must allow our primary persona (Techno Todd) to find ESG information simply and compare companies they’re interested in before purchasing. The interface should have simple navigation bars and side bars so that the user doesn’t have to think for more than two seconds when they query and compare; our goal is to reduce the amount of time that Techno Todd spends researching on purchases and give him more time to participate in pro-climate change activities. For our secondary persona (Activist Amy), our solution should allow her to share her purchases and comparisons with others. Because she’s younger and enjoys engaging in public displays of her views, our solution should satisfy this condition.

What will the impact of a successful solution be?

A successful design would significantly improve individuals and their ability to make sustainably informed purchase and investment decisions.

Currently, consumer’s simply lack the ability to make easy comparisons between companies, whether for purchase decisions or investment decisions. A successful solution would provide palatable information that both consumers can use. One impact would be to provide (and compare) sufficient ESG information for people who currently lack it, but wish to use to inform their decisions (eg. Techie Todd and Activist Amy). A successful solution should alleviate this challenge, and remove the hurdles (the lack of information) that prevent climate-conscious individuals from living sustainably. Furthermore, this information could also inform financially literate individuals (like Todd), and help them make more sustainability-informed investment decisions.

Furthermore, we expect a successful solution to also empower well-meaning individuals to pursue sustainability, even if they are very price conscious. For example, our tool might allow users like Poorly-informed Penelope to make more ESG compliant decisions when deciding between two otherwise identical products. If we can give her concrete, comparable, and trustworthy metrics, we can make it easier for her to make decisions based on ESG. Sure, they might not necessarily pay a premium, and ESG might not be their number one priority when making purchase decisions. But a successful solution could change their behavior to be at least somewhat more environmentally-friendly.

If we empower all of these different consumers, regardless of their experience or knowledge of sustainability, our solution should successfully close the information gap, and change consumer decision-making to be more sustainability/ESG focused. Furthermore, by providing information in a palatable format, a successful solution could create a larger trend that businesses take note of. Now that consumers know about carbon credits, and make decisions based on them (consumers vote with their dollar), companies finally have an incentive to pursue legitimate, measurable, climate/ESG action.

Concerns, Shortcomings, Areas not Investigated, Trade Offs Made

A tradeoff that our team made when developing our personas was the decision to not conduct user interviews due to time constraints. Because of this we made many assumptions about our users who experience the problem we are trying to solve, and we are missing the nuance and contradiction that comes with talking to people. One way to mitigate our team’s bias is to do user testing throughout our iterative design process and to make edits to our personas, which represent our initial assumptions, as we go.

An area that we identified as a possible concern is that in the status quo, ESG data (carbon footprint, emissions, etc) is difficult to find and is not very robust. How and by whom the data is collected is not standardized, and is hard to compare. The quality and utility of ESG data in 2022 is quite limited. The reason we chose not to pursue this in our research is that we are operating under the assumption that in the future, this data will be commonplace, standardized, and accessible at some point in the future. Our goal is to make that data palatable to the average consumer, once it is available. Despite this assumption, we don’t think it will necessarily impede our development or testing. We can always test our product/platform using placeholder data. For the purposes of testing consumer behavior, we don’t believe that consumers will suddenly interact with our solution differently when the data itself becomes higher quality. Therefore, we can still use tests in 2022 to inform how consumers might use the solution many years in the future.

Our team is also targeting an overly niche market of consumers who are passionate about ESG efforts. We risk not being able to expand our customer base past this audience. We also risk the passion of our primary market subsiding. If the current cohort of ESG individuals fall to the issue of unfairness and stop participating in extreme research before purchase because others aren’t, our platform is obsolete.

Phase Effort Distribution