Overview

Donating or recycling consumer electronics conserves our natural resources and avoids air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas emissions that are caused by manufacturing virgin materials.

Recycling one million laptops saves the energy equivalent to the electricity used by more than 3,500 US homes in a year. For every million cell phones we recycle, 35 thousand pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold and 33 pounds of palladium can be recovered.

The Challenge

Design a webpage to help people donate and recycle their unwanted/unused electronics

Research

• Our team needed to find out what hurdles prevented people from recycling.

• We developed a survey to help us understand the issues people in the community faced when they wanted to donate or recycle eWaste.

As a team, We put together 13 questions that would provide us with answers on what people do with their E-waste. We got 57 responses and found that the biggest barrier for people is not knowing what they could recycle. As well as 48% of respondents didn’t know where they could recycle E-waste

Interviews

We wanted to dig deeper into what motivated our interviewees to recycle and confirm if our survey findings were accurate.

• Knowing what to recycle is difficult because there were too many different sites offering too much information to sort through.

• Many facilities accept specific donations and there was a worry that items they brought may not be accepted or end up being thrown out.

• Want to be responsible but don’t want to spend a lot of time sorting everything out.

Persona

Wireframing

Using this feedback, we focused most of our efforts in creating a streamlined process to help people get their electronics to a recycle center or donation location.

We also built in a compensation section to our flow. We also wanted a section to offer education to help people feel more educated and understanding their impact.

After taking some of these screens and creating a flow that users can go through for testing purposes, there were some issues that were started to come up. Users were confused on how the compensation portion was viable. What if they wanted to search for a specific device? Taking this info, we made some changes to the design.

Using some of the feedback, we decided to take out our compensation portion. It wasnt super viable in the first place and we wanted to people to give back and potentially help someone out.

Final Designs

Within our final designs, the final decision was to just keep things simple and have it be a minimal process for users to get rid of their things they have no use for.

Conclusion

In conclusion, The biggest thing we learned about this was how many people have no idea that they can do with their old electronics. On the other end of that, teaching myself what the impact not recycling E-waste can/does have on the planet. We had a lot of fun with this project even though it was stressful and tedious at times.