Growth Trails
Cover artwork for UK musician and sound artist Lee Riley.
TL;DR
Personal project
Creative collaboration with Oxford-based musician and sound artist Lee Riley.
ROLE
- Photography
- Design
- Artwork
TOOLS
- Fuji X100T
- Lightroom
- Photoshop
Context
RecycleSmart is an on-demand recycling pick-up service for residents & businesses. They partner with local councils in Sydney, who are happy to subsidise the service because it reduces their costs from incorrect disposal of waste.
RecycleSmart wanted to get more councils on board. To do that, they needed to show the value of their service - and to do that, they wanted to increase both their customer base and customer usage.
They wanted to validate the idea of a subscription service.
DESIGN CHALLENGES
From the business point of view, simplifying the pickup process seemed key to making it scalable – having every transaction on demand was an expensive way to operate.
Increasing the service charge was also a non-starter – customer data showed people tended to wait for free promos, rather than pay a $2 fee. They liked the service, but didn’t value it in practice.
There was also a problem of cognitive dissonance that RecycleSmart’s biggest fans recognised – justifying the carbon footprint of someone coming to pick up their recycling.
Related to this, there needed to be a way to handle ‘no-shows’ – people booking a pickup but not leaving a bag out. A financial penalty made sense – but what if asking for payment details upfront was a disincentive to signing up?
A final problem was how to keep existing happy customers on board if the service effectively changed from their schedule to RecycleSmart’s?
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Designing solutions
Workshopping assumptions about users helped us identify risks we needed to explore in detail. This informed a set of working hypotheses we could research and test. Some were reframed as user stories for ideation, with the best ideas developed a stage further into user flows and a lo-fi prototype.
Reflections
WHAT WORKED WELL
There's something very satisfying about making a physical product (most of my design work has been digital). As a huge music fan, and a big supporter of Oxford's thriving music scene, seeing something I was involved in creating on sale in our local record shop was pretty cool. And as a longtime admirer of Lee's work, I was delighted to work with him in such a free collaboration.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK WELL
Looking back, I'd do it a little bit differently today - cutting out the mid-tones and adding some texture to compensate for the smooth finish of the inlay card.
Selected work
Brookes GlobalRedesign, Web
RecycleSmartProduct Design / UX
Solar-eUX Research | UX Design | Service Design