Update on Project Activities
This week, our team explored the Menlo Park Green Challenge website in further detail and held a conference call with Diane Bailey in order to provide updates on our project progress. During our call, we offered suggestions to improve the accessibility of the site, discussed potential strategies for surveying students and their preference of prizes for completed actions, and set a date next week to meet on-site. We also met outside of class to begin our scope of work and get to know each other better! What We Observed and Learned In order to organize all of our suggestions for the Green Challenge site, we held a meeting before the call and grouped both our older and recent observations into specific topics. When addressing Diane, we went over each of our suggestions in detail, all geared towards making the site less complicated for the average household. We first shared our suggestions from last week: to make the site user friendly by adding time commitment and cost filters on the actions as well as using survey results to determine the most applicable actions to get started on the Challenge. We also think a beneficial addition to the survey would be a checklist of all the actions, giving users the option to check off completed actions before being taken to the main page with all of the actions. This way they don’t have to search for each completed action individually, and can get to new actions more quickly. Next, we explained our most recent concerns surrounding the content of the actions and the point system. Regarding the general actions, ranging from recycling to installing an electric pump heater, the descriptions on their respective pages are extremely long, and sometimes lack specificity and/or citations for important statistics For example, the article discussing solar panel installation uses statistics matching the size of a solar system in comparison to the size of a home, but loses credibility by not citing the source. Furthermore, how the points were assigned to each action was confusing and somewhat arbitrary. To provide context, an “easy” action like line-drying clothes has a very similar point value to the “challenging” action of insulating one’s floors and walls. Each of our suggestions centered around making the Green Challenge more feasible, easier to understand and more relatable to participants. In order to incentivize students to participate in the Green Challenge, we need to find out what types of prizes they would be most interested in. We are going to email the principals at La Entrada and Menlo Atherton to see if we can send a survey home in students’ take-home folders. During our meeting this week, we got to know each other better, we outlined our project scope of work, assigned team roles, and organized our time table for completing the deliverables due in the following weeks to the class and our community partner. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Diane appreciated our suggestions for improving the Green Challenge website and urged us to compile these notes into a document so she could share our findings with the Menlo Spark team. This action will be a part of our scope of work so that we can make a timeline that fits in with each of our goals well. Next week we hope to provide more website suggestions, and include them in our write up, decide the most mindful and ethical way to survey teachers and students, send out our survey to school students and/or teachers, and get more connected with the community we want to serve. In addition, we hope to find a family and/or students to interview within the next few weeks so we can publish a more realistic success story on the Green Challenge website. In order to do so we will write up some information about the story so that it can be advertised to families via Menlo Spark’s newsletter. Update on Project Activities
This week, our team met with a our community partner, Diane, representing Menlo Spark. While meeting, we had the opportunity to ask her questions, and to discuss her visions for the project. Diane expressed her desire to make the site more user-friendly, and tasked us with creating an account and exploring the site before our next meeting. In pursuance of this goal we each made an account on the Green Challenge Website and observed aspects that could be improved to improve the experience of the site’s visitors. As we learned in our Fostering Sustainable Behavior reading, the most sustainable option is not always the most feasible and/or convenient. What We Observed and Learned While the site does have the option to filter actions by difficulty level, we feel that there should be more filtering options that allow the user to select actions by the amount of time and money they are willing to commit to a sustainability project. We believe this tailored approach would increase the likelihood that an individual will take the recommended actions. Another option for tailoring the challenge to a specific individual would be suggesting actions based on survey answers. After you fill out the survey, you are told how you compare to other households in different areas, but are not told how you can improve based on your results. Having concrete next steps that are most relevant to the participant’s current lifestyle would personalize the experience and encourage follow-through. We recognized there were areas where the survey succeeded and others where it needed improvement. For example, there are easily answerable questions like your household’s square footage or your car’s gas mileage. But the survey also asks for unfamiliar values such as the distance you drive or travel (by air) in a year. Perhaps, providing formulas such as “Distance from house to work and back * 5 days a week * 52 weeks in a year = …” Making the math easier for the user could be an area of improvement for the survey. Furthermore, the survey could have a built in calculator for some of that data, increasing the likelihood of user completion and accuracy. Publishing a success story will motivate potential participants to complete actions, but the current story posted on the website is generic and lacking in realism. The current story discusses a family’s conversion to solar energy but oversimplifies the process in an attempt to make the switch seem more accessible and too good to be true for the average consumer. When we interview a family with a success story this quarter, we hope to promote the positive aspects of their green journey while maintaining realism. In other words, we will also poll the family about their struggles and how they overcame these obstacles. In addition, we aim to feature a family whose green living experience is more accessible. Often, people are under the impression that in order to go “green” one must spend a lot of money or make very drastic lifestyle changes. We hope that the featured success story will showcase a family that has made huge strides in improving sustainability by taking relatively simple steps that are accessible to a wide variety of folks in the area. This approach will make the story more relatable, and will encourage other households to take similar simple steps, breaking down the idea that sustainability is hard. Moving Forward From readings and our meeting with Diane, we gathered that convincing people to take action is hard. This is one of the most demanding tasks; getting people to become more sustainable given their different socioeconomic backgrounds, lifestyle, households, and motivation. Moving forward, we’ll come up with concrete solutions for the improvement of the survey and the Solar Success story. The success of the Menlo Green Challenge lies in popularizing it and making it both attractive and accessible. To publicize, we’ll think of ways for spreading the word about the Menlo Green Challenge using social media. Incentivizing the members of the Challenge is equally important. Surveying a diverse test group could help us come up with Sustainable Actions tailored to a variety of lifestyles and attractive prizes that’ll keep the users motivated. |
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