JouleBug is a mobile app that makes going green easy, social, and fun. It has been featured multiple times on the App Store and named an Editors' Choice on Google Play. Created by a mission-driven startup founded with the lofty goal of making people act more sustainably, JouleBug is also the tentpole experience of a larger behavioral-change platform.
My Contributions
Visual + Interaction Design
Project Management
Creative Direction
Marketing
the Challenge
Cleanbit Systems' founders are passionate about climate change. But they felt it was too hard for most people to do something about it. The only options involved expensive tech only afforded by the rich, or scouring the internet for 'green tips' amid images of crying polar bears that left everyone just feeling guilty. So, with the goals of making going green accessible, social, and fun, the idea for the JouleBug mobile app was born.
B.J. Fogg's Behavior Model
Research & Approach
I served as the UX Designer, working with a highly collaborative team of about 5 developers to create the iOS and Android and web app experiences from scratch. As the sole designer on the team, I was responsible for the User Experience from ideation to implementation.
From the beginning, we focused the experience around taking existing behaviors and make them greener. Early on, we absorbed the research of behavioral change scientists at Stanford. This research led us to a strategy of focusing on three primary factors: motivation, ability and triggers. Nearly any feature we created was with the goal of increasing or improving those factors.
With this in mind, we chose four key areas to build JouleBug's behavioral change experience around: Actions, Competition, Social, and Impact.
Taking Action
JouleBug's core experience is all about taking action. The app is organized into hundreds of Actions that users Buzz when they do them in real life.
You can't change a behavior you don't know about, so the interface makes discovering new actions easy and delightful. Each action includes details that help educate and inspire the user to adopt the habit. Actions are easily customizable by customers to bring attention to their specific initiatives, and add specific local information for certain actions.
Friendly Competition
From the beginning we knew that gamification, specifically competition, can be a powerful motivator for changing behavior. We created competitive Challenges as a flexible tool to increase engagement. The desire to win, while working against the clock, creates ample motivation and effective triggers for behavioral change. Challenge rules are flexible enough to appeal to a range of customer needs and user playing styles.
Challenges are also a scalable product, effective for small businesses as well as global brands with hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes.
Sharing & Impact
To tap into social pressure as a motivational force, every Buzz is shared to the activity feed, with captions and photos. Seeing what actions your friends are taking inspires users to take action of their own, creating a healthy cycle. In addition to motivation, they also help our customers build camaraderie within teams and organizations.
JouleBug tracks each user and challenge's impact to show how our collective changes add up for a common good. Using expert research, we estimate the real-life savings compared to the alternative for each habit adopted. This adds up to large amounts of carbon, waste, and water savings. To make these large quantities more tangible at any scale, we used fun conversions to put them in perspective.
Customer Control
We partnered with cities, universities, and businesses that wanted to use the app as a tool to teach and motivate their members to change their habits. Through the Admin Dashboard, leaders can manage their organization, customize actions and challenges, and dovetail the app with their own initiatives.
Based on feedback from JouleBug corporate customers, we created an expanded and private version of JouleBug, called Shine. Focused primarily on large businesses, Shine's Actions and Challenges are all about employee wellbeing, consisting of fitness, nutrition, volunteering, and sustainability.
The Result
JouleBug is available for free on the App Store and on Google Play. The iOS version has been featured by the editors of the App Store on Earth Day in 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018. The Android version has also been featured and was named an Editor's Choice on Google Play in 2018.
The JouleBug platform is trusted by global brands like IKEA and Siemens to represent their ideals to their co-workers and customers. It's been used to reward hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes for taking sustainable action.
“Doing things every day as part of a Challenge for 9 days, really kind of ingrains it in your mind and makes it stick with you.”
“We could not have been more pleased with our first Green Cup Challenge and are very excited about our future Challenges.”
More Projects
Taking Action
Better Habits Through Competition
Taking Control
Make it Yours