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Amazon Eco

Role: Prototype Designer

Skills: UX Design, UX Research, Storyboarding, Wireframing, Prototyping

Timeline: January 2022 - March 2022

Team: Tina Yu, Yu Jin, Juan Ramcez Castaneda, Hanley Yu

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Amazon Eco

There is a scientific consensus that there is a need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2050. It is clear that no one company or organization can accomplish this on their own and taking individual actions are necessary to further these efforts. One thing we can all do is be more environmentally conscious when we shop and make more sustainable shopping decisions.

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The Challenge: 

No one knows about Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program, one of the easiest ways to shop sustainably on the biggest e-commerce platform.

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Amazon is an e-commerce platform that helps reduce consumer impact on the environment through its Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) program. CPF ensures that products are checked and certified to be environmentally friendly with a little badge indicator. The problem is, not a lot of people know about the CPF program. It's slightly hidden away making it not utilized as much as it can be. We found a way to combat that through Amazon Eco, our team's creation of a new Amazon subsidiary dedicated to CPF! 

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Problem Statement

How might we help customers increase their awareness when shopping for products on the Amazon marketplace so that they can reduce their carbon footprint on the environment?

Personas

After conducting 27 interviews as a team, we developed two personas as a way to express different the experiences our interviews had.

Persona 1: Environmentally Educated Consumer

Our first persona is Camelia Johnson, someone who is well researched and invested in environmental sustainability. Our creation of this persona is based on 4 of our 27 questionnaire participants who expressed a strong passion for sustainability. She is our environmentally educated consumer persona.

Persona 2: Apathetic Student Shopper

Our second persona is Matthew Ronaldo. He is a student who has no particularly strong feelings towards environmental sustainability but agrees that it is important. His main concern when purchasing products is the price. Our creation of this persona is based on 12 of our 27 questionnaire participants who are students. He is our apathetic student shopper persona.

Concept Generation

We decided to expand on two concepts by generating two UX flowcharts that meet the needs and pain points of our personas. 

UX Flow 1: 

Despite having the Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) program, which verifies sellers and specific products as environmentally friendly, Amazon makes little to no design effort in making it visible. This UX flow creates a direct path for users to shop for CPF products. 

UX Flow 2: 

Our second UX Flow primarily addresses the needs and frustrations of the Apathetic Student Shopper, whose first priority when online shopping is not environmental sustainability; however, it does help increase the overall visibility of environmentally sustainable options for all users.

UI Sketches:

To bring the UX flowcharts to life, I created some quick sketches of what I envisioned when building the flowcharts. I took inspiration from Amazon’s current app for my sketches because I wanted our extensions to feel like a seamless experience for users. I incorporated ideas we came up with during the UX flow creation stage where we thought of creating an interface within the Amazon app where the user enters a section of the app where all products listed are under their CPF program much like Amazon Fresh where all searched items under that interface are under the Amazon Fresh subsidiary. 

Wireframes

We created our low-fidelity interactive prototype based on our sketches to further visualize our potential solution.

UX Flow 1 Prototype:

UX Flow 2 Prototype:

After consulting our stakeholders through user testing, we decided to move forward with a combination of UX Flow 1 and UX Flow 2. We further decided to go ahead and call the subsidiary in UX Flow 1 Amazon Eco. 

 

Why Amazon Eco (UX Flow 1): With Amazon Eco, every product listed on this subsidiary will be part of the Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) program. Shopping for sustainable goods will never be easier when users can directly look for only CPF products.  

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Why UX Flow 2: It's important for us to recognize the use case of our redesign. Many of the people we had initially interviewed were interested in leading a more environmentally conscious lifestyle; however, they did not have a deep passion for it. In other to cater towards this mass majority, we decided to implement easy ways for people to shop for sustainable alternatives without going to a separate branch on the app.

User testing feedback:

  • Add an onboarding process

  • Explain jargon (what is Climate Pledge Friendly?)

  • Filters in UX Flow 2 require too many buttons 

  • Highlight "Learn More" for easier accessibility

Final Prototype

We created the final prototype of Amazon Eco on Figma. Amazon Eco has three main user flows:

  1. Onboarding: get to know all of our changes

  2. Amazon Eco: shop for sustainable products and learn all about Climate Pledge Friendly

  3. Product Page: compare non-sustainable products with sustainable options on any Amazon product page

Onboarding:

Amazon Eco:

Product Pages:

Reflection

Amazon Eco is a project that I feel an incredible amount of pride for. My team began this project knowing absolutely nothing of the Climate Pledge Friendly program and actually began with the initial thought of creating something alike to the program. After doing more research and finding out about CPF, we were even more adamant about creating a successful project because we were all so appalled that not we and not a single person we interviewed knew about CPF. The benefits of CPF were not being utilized and it really hit us as designers that Amazon is essentially hiding this program by not having reliable UX design to navigate CPF. 

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Looking at our project, I think that we have done a fantastic job at ensuring that the app feels and looks just as you all know of Amazon. The user experience of Amazon Eco is wonderful and now it is just up to consumers to make use of it. There's no missing Amazon Eco. Our biggest concern is whether or not people care enough to use Amazon Eco but that is not something that we can easily fix as designers. 

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