A browser plug-in to help customers make more responsible shopping decisions.
Shopping responsibly is like flossing. People know it’s something they should do, but not everyone puts in the energy to do it. There are many ways to practice responsible consumerism like shopping locally, supporting small businesses, or buying eco-conscious products. But our research revealed that people don’t shop responsibly because it requires extra work to find high-quality, responsible products.
Responsible Swaps is a browser plug-in that detects a user’s search query and shows them responsible product alternatives to items they’ve just searched for. I found through user research that people already have their go-to websites for shopping online. So to make discovering responsible products easier, I prototyped a solution that meets consumers in places where they’re already shopping—their favorite e-commerce sites.
Clicking on the purple tab reveals product alternatives to items the user just searched for.
I highlighted both the lowest-price and highest-rated responsible alternatives in these special modules because our research found that consumers like to consider the best deals available to them, but ultimately they choose items based on quality.
Consumers are given the option to easily swap items in their cart with a responsible alternative. There is also a clear "undo" button to reverse the swap.
Research for this project was conducted in conjunction with three of my classmates as part of a graduate school project.
To capture a wide range of shopping behaviors and experiences we conducted 1:1 interviews and observation studies with participants that varied in age, gender, and shopping frequency.
In the interviews, we asked participants what responsible consumerism meant to them. And then in our observation studies, we observed those same participants’ behaviors as they performed two tasks:
Our research revealed these key insights:
After individually brainstorming solutions, we did a few rounds of sticker voting to determine which ideas to prototype. For the assignment, we each prototyped our own unique solutions. The browser plug-in was an idea that I came up with in my independent brainstorm, so I was excited to be the one to prototype it.
First, I sketched the flow a user would take to swap an item in their cart with a responsible alternative.
Once I had a high-fidelity, interactive prototype, I conducted usability tests on real customers and found some good things and some things I needed to improve.
My prototype makes responsible products more easily discoverable during the searching and checking-out phases of shopping. But there is still a need for greater clarification around what actually makes a product “responsible.”
In future iterations, I will explore how my prototype may be able to leverage existing sets of products, like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly products, to ensure that the responsible alternatives recommended by my plug-in fulfill a defined responsibility standard.
