FillSchools

Connecting businesses and schools together to turn waste into opportunity

Introduction—

This 4-day design sprint seeks to explore sustainable waste management from a business lens. Due to time constraints, our team focused heavily on the research and design steps in our process. This involved a deep dive into reusable business waste and schools as a possible receiving end. The ultimate goal is to design a B2B web app, where businesses connect with schools to offer their resources.

Process—

  • Discovery + Research

  • Ideation

  • Design

  • Next Steps

Role—

  • UX/UI Designer

  • Team of 3

  • Mainly responsible for research and design regarding schools/supplies

Tools—

  • Adobe XD

  • Zoom

Duration—

4 days

Understanding the Challenge—

“Design an application to help people reduce unnecessary waste. This must be done with technology that is available today or would be viable within 6 months.”

Our team held a brief discovery session to better familiarize ourselves with the prompt. “People” and “waste” being so broad, we chose to focus on a more specific issue surrounding unnecessary waste brought on by businesses. From prior knowledge, we knew that some clothing brands discard their unsold items to keep their clothes away from secondhand merchants or to maintain their brand reputation. Running with this lead, we wondered who else could be discarding usable items?

Secondary Research—

Each year millions of potential reusable and recyclable materials are disposed and landfilled.

This is due to the lack of understanding how to properly collect, store and remove these materials safely and cost effectively. Forums were uncovered revealing how employees have to damage and throw away items that get discontinued, expired or are no longer needed for their employers. Companies that came up included bookstores, arts and crafts stores and electronics stores.

As we start to make this connection between businesses and schools, ensuring a mutualistic relationship is key.

We explored the idea of incentivizing businesses to actually donate their items versus tossing them out to landfills. We found that we could potentially help businesses save money each year by converting their donations to non-profit schools into tax deductibles, or more specifically, a printable donation tax receipt. It would also be an effective way to boost business morale.

The beginning of every school year teachers open up their wallets to buy classroom supplies.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the nation’s K–12 public school teachers spend at least $459 every year out-of-pocket on supplies for their students. Even more, they do not get reimbursed for these purchases. It was also found that teachers in high-poverty schools are spending more of their own money than are teachers in low-poverty schools, and these numbers are increasing overall.

Narrowing the Problem—

Our secondary research revealed that businesses continuously throw away their excess products because they do not have the resources to reallocate them. Meanwhile, schools are constantly struggling to fund their classroom supplies, resulting in teachers having to pay for it themselves. Also important to note, all donations to non-profit schools can be included as deductible charitable contributions on taxes.

New Problem Statement—

Design a platform that allows businesses to connect with schools to donate their unwanted, yet still-usable items.

Proposed Solution—

FillSchools, a web-based service aimed to connect businesses and schools together to combat waste and redistribute resources. Both parties can take part in this process through 4 simple steps:

Sketches—

With a clearer idea, we jumped into sketching out our pages, aiming to build out user flows for our two different users—businesses and schools.

Style Guide—

Our team fleshed out a simple style guide to maintain visual consistency as we assigned pages to design. A bright blue was chosen to represent communication, trust and evoke a sense of intelligence.

 Landing Page—

Sign Up—

User Flow for Businesses—

Business users would navigate to their home dashboard after signing up. Here, they can view their metrics, such as total value of donations and pounds kept out of landfills. They can also reach their “My Donations” page where they keep track of their donations and view full reports. Once they’re ready to make a new donation offer, they can add a new listing and receive a list of matches, or schools, according to the items, distance, etc.

 User Flow for Schools—

Users from the school end would navigate to their “My Requests” page after signing up. Here, they can view the statuses of their requests and create new ones. Once they create a listing, they would be matched with businesses that are offering these products. This is sorted by category, quantity and distance.

 Messaging—

After a business and a school are matched, they can then communicate via our messaging system to confirm donations and set up methods for transferring the items. Once they work out these details, the items will be delivered and they can update their listing statuses on their request or offer forms.

Next Steps—

With more time, our team would strengthen our study by advancing our mockup to a working prototype and validating our designs. Additionally, we would like to address the pain point of transporting items in an efficient way. We left our design sprint at our messaging system, but hope to actually connect businesses and schools with delivery services in their area. As far as what we would do differently, we needed to flesh out our user research with interviews. We would reach out to local businesses, schools and teachers to successfully understand their experiences and needs.