The brief
Cooks River is one of the most polluted rivers in Australia. The River Canoe Club and Civille have been cleaning litter for years. They have now set a goal to halve the litter along the Cooks River Catchment area by 2025. Recently, they want to involve individuals or small businesses in litter prevention, and they also want to engage people to join their community.
How might we change people’s long-term behaviour and encourage people to do something about litter prevention?
Duration
A 3 weeks sprint
Team
Ivy, Nobuto, Vanessa
Methods
Business analysis, secondary research, competitive & comparative analysis, surveys, affinity mapping, Minimum Viable Products, design studio, sketching and strategic planning
Client
The River Canoe Club & Civille
Deliverables
Tools
Paper & pencil, Google Form, Notion, Miro and Figma
Understanding the goal
“We want to engage people, but we don’t know where to start” —The River Canoe Club
We learned that:
It’s a broad topic.
This is not a project with a clear path.
The clients are sure about what to start with.
How did find the direction?
Finding the way out by doing a lot of secondary research
To understand the littering problem and narrow down the topic, we did much secondary research to find out the main problem. We found out:
Trying multiple solutions
We tried to focus on the main issues mentioned above, and we came up with a lot of ideas:
Campaign for ideas generation
Physical fun bin
Reducing the use of the single-use coffee cup, which need both campaign and physical design
Campaign for reducing snack packaging
These are good ideas, but these ideas alone can’t meet our clients’ needs.
Trying to understand what people are thinking
So we try to dig deeper, and we realise that the main problem is whether people really care about the littering issue at all? So we started to design the survey, which is focused on:
Do people aware of the littering problem?
Do people do anything for littering prevention?
Do people aware of what did their community do to prevent litter?
What do they care about in terms of littering problems?
Survey
People are lack awareness and motivation
After analysing 40 survey responses, we found out:
How do other countries prevent littering?
Community pride & emotional propaganda is the key
We also looked into 17 successful campaigns worldwide and found out most campaigns motivate people through pride and showing their love for the local community.
Journey Mapping
Education increase engagement
We wanted to know why people were not engaging in the campaign, so we created a journey map, and we found out people are more likely to join the Clean-Up event if they were educated about the impact of littering.
The deliverables
Motivation, awareness & triggers drive behaviour change
The strategy below illustrates the elements for community engagement in litter prevention.
Motivation, awareness and triggers are all critical components that drive education and encourage long term change. It’s not a linear process, and there are multiple ways this can be addressed.
What else do we need to change people’s long-term behaviour?
People need triggers and start small
Dr BJ Fogg suggests that three elements must converge simultaneously for a behaviour to occur: Motivation, ability, and a prompt.
This model also suggests that changes are made by starting with small and easy steps.
Our research found that everyone can pick up litter. Still, people don’t have enough motivation and triggers, so their behaviour doesn’t change.
Motivation
How can we motivate people?
Emotional engagement
Helping people to decide with their hearts is proven to have more influence than the mind.
Personal experience
Personal experience serves as a basis for reflection. From reflections, we can develop opinions that motivate us to take action.
Personal benefit
Sometimes we are motivated by egoistic reasons and how things will benefit us. This can inspire people to push for better social and economic outcomes.
Local closeness
People feel more concerned about issues close to home, touching on sensitive matters. Local closeness brings intimacy throughout a community.
Awareness
Raising awareness through social media & website
Here are some examples of how we might engage the community. Social media and websites might be the best way to tackle the littering problem because:
Social media will have the highest visibility with relative ease and minimal expense.
Website will become crucial in navigating your audience to stay informed and take action.
Example of social media
Social media + motivation
Thinking back to what drives motivations, we have created some examples of social media posts.
These examples include building pride, evoking emotions and linking a sense of local closeness together with slogan and call to action.
Build pride
Evoke emotion
Local closeness
Litter Prevention website
The basic structure of the Litter Prevention website
We explored ideas on what the Litter Prevention website might entail.
First, we need to educate people on the impact of litter to raise awareness.
Then show them the goal and overall progress made so far.
Then give them an easy way to get involved.
The basic sketches of the Litter Prevention website
Home page
Capturing the audience’s attention by acknowledging responsibility and showing how close the problem is to home.
Recognising the people within the community that are already doing good work to help encourage others to join in.
The impact page
Educating people on the effects of littering around the catchment area as they might not be aware.
This can be done interactively to make pictures and graphics more fun and exciting.
The vision page
It’s a visual representation to help people understand the goal’s progress and easy steps to get started.
Photos, graphs and charts to depict this.
Get involved page
It’s a visual representation to help people understand the goal’s progress and easy steps to get started.
Photos, graphs and charts to depict this.
River Canoe Club Website
Educate people from the River Canoe Club website
While the Litter Prevention website is being built, we suggest River Canoe Club revamp their website. It will give people more opportunities to be educated and get involved easily. According to our research, these three sections could include:
Current website
Propose wbsite
Trigger
Starting small from individual
To create long term behaviour change in the community - we must start small and focus on the individuals.
Proactive trigger example
Preventing over-filling bin
Messaging on bins and the messages from the council may also help reduce overfilling and ensure people take bins out on the correct night. Showing how to compact your recycling will help ensure people are doing the right thing.
Reactive triggers example
Ideas generation campaign
Creating competitions with prizes is a great way to get potential ideas and start the conversation. Assigning local leaders and giving them tools to run litter workshops online or in-person maybe be a great way to source creative ideas from the community.
What’s now?
Keep testing on a small scale!
We realised successful initiatives can take on many forms. We won’t know what works best for the Cooks River without trying them first. So we recommend RCC and Civille test small in the hotspot area, then measure its success instead of making a big decision that might fail. Then, RCC can re-prioritise their list and change direction quickly depending on how successful a campaign is.
Reflection
What did I learn?
This is not a project with a clear path. How did I deal with it?
Have more deep conversations with the clients to find out their pain points & needs.
Sometimes, clients are unsure what they want, but they know what they don’t want to after showing them something.
Digging the real problem by doing a lot of primary & secondary research.
Determining the final design direction by designing multiple solutions and delivering them to clients.
Keep communicating with the clients to ensure we are on the same page.
UX design is not only about designing a website or app.
