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. Comments are closed.
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