Your Carbon Footprint
Overview
The 'Carbon Footprint Manager' is helping bank customers understand their environmental impact based on their transactions and adopt sustainable practices.
This product caters to growing number of sustainable conscious customers and bank's need to stay relevant and supportive in their customers life.
It is a add on of the white-label solution 'Personal Finance Assistent' that can be integrated in any eBanking solution or banking app, providing innovation cross-platforms.
Role
Product Management: Product strategy, market analysis, aligning stakeholders, prioritising product features, writing user stories, and managing the collaboration with an external company to bring this product to life.
UX & UI Design: User research, facilitating cross-company workshops, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing, final designs, defining technical requirements, prioritising backlog, quality assurance
Year • Location
2022-2023 • Zurich, Switzerland
Research
Prior to me joining the company the former team conducted quantitative research, and when I took over the project I conducted qualitative research. This formed the foundation for gauging the proportion of environmentally-conscious banking clientele and understanding their requirements, should a financial services provider aim to cater to their eco-friendly preferences.
Interviews with banks showed that they are concerned about the perception of engaging in greenwashing practices. On the other hand they are aware of current trends and want to provide value to different customer segments.
Before starting with the iterative process a competitor analysis helped to understand the market trends and identify opportunities, especially in the Swiss market where no other company is able to enrich data on a national level.
I facilitated a shortened design sprint with our partner Deedster, to gain rapid market insights, leverage diverse perspectives, strengthen collaboration, and expedite the development of innovative solutions.
From both sides UX Designers, Data Analysts, and Engineers took part, as well as the CTO of Deedster.
Design sprint
The shortened design sprint was conducted remotely using FigJam, allowing my team in Zurich to efficiently collaborate with our partner in Stockholm.
Insights
Based on research in the exploration phase:
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Sustainable conscious users are interested in their own carbon footprint but often don't calculated it because it is too much effort and they do not trust to remember everything they bought or consumed
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If it is calculated automatically based on their transaction with their main bank, they do not expect a 100% accurate result but a transparent explanation how it has been calculated
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They prefer strong visualisation, helping them to understand the abstract concept of their carbon footprint better
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They want to compare themselves to others but don't want to be judged
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They appreciate positive enforcement and next steps instead of only knowing their carbon footprint but not knowing what to do to improve it.
Usability tests
Taking a user-centered design approach, it is important to validate functionality and design assumptions, and facilitate iterative improvements based on user feedback. Wireframes and design were created using Figma.
User feedback during iterations
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Users prefer no colors when seeing their footprint, as they have negative effects: 'I don't want to be in the red zone, that depresses me.'
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They would like neutral feedback in case of high emissions and supportive feedback in case of low emissions.
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'Having a benchmark is good, but Switzerland alone is not a good point of reference, as it has a high carbon footprint.', which is why in addition to the national average, an 'optimum' (climate goal 2030) has been introduced.
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'Nice to have the carbon footprint calculated automatically - but what can I do to improve it?': Users would like to have relevant suggestions, tailored to their life.
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Users desire "easy-to-apply" tips that they can seamlessly integrate into their lives.
We wanted to provide a variety of new tips per month to choose from, without creating a choice overload where people will just browse but never apply a tip.
This is why initially there are 6 personalised tips, and only if all of them have been applied by a user, the user gets 6 additional tips for that month.
Encouraging feedback shows progress over time.
Main functionality
Banking customers' carbon footprint is calculated automatically for them, based on their enriched transactions, taking more than 200 transaction categories and 90 data sources into account.
To help them put an abstract number into context, users can compare their monthly or yearly carbon footprint with the national average and the climate goal 2030.
Furthermore users can see their overall number broken down into categories, where transactions are automatically assigned to one of the following categories: Food, Home, Travel & Transport, Shopping, and Health & Leisure.
With personalised tips and gamification elements that are constantly being expanded, concrete recommendations for reducing their footprint are also provided.
Platforms
The Carbon Footprint Manager can be integrated into any web and mobile banking solutions.
Conclusions
Banks posse the capacity to effect meaningful change and offer added value beyond conventional banking practices.
Working with a partner was crucial to bring this solution to the market, with one side providing enriched transaction data and the other side the carbon intensity, expressed in kg CO₂ emission per Swiss franc (CHF).
Next steps
The transaction-based calculation is an estimation since it does not reveal the exact lifestyle of a person. The transactions reveal how much a customer spends on groceries, but they do not indicate whether the purchases include vegetables or meat.
In order to offer an even more accurate carbon footprint, it is necessary to include a questionnaire where users can answer some lifestyle questions such as dietary preferences, travel destinations, or if they fuel their car with petrol or diesel.
