Exploring Sustainable Building with BuildWell

What is BuildWell?

BuildWell is a fictional ecommerce platform that connects homeowners and contractors to sources for refurbished materials encouraging more sustainable and more affordable construction. This project was created during 2020 as part of my UX certification in LaunchCode’s 24-week CoderGirl Bootcamp program.

The Tiny Muse for the BuildWell Project

Owners of tiny homes are super creative when it comes to saving money and building sustainably. People can create amazing products with used materials. Seeing what can be done with refurbished resources inspired me to want to help others discover eco-friendly alternatives and assist individuals to sell their old materials.

  • 1. The Problem: Usable Materials with Nowhere to go

    In 2018, the EPA estimated that 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris were generated in the United States. This waste production is more than twice the amount of municipal solid waste generated annually.

  • 2. The Next Step: An Attempt to Help Scale Back the Waste

    It has been estimated that 80% of construction waste can be diverted from the landfill through reuse.

    Through my competitive analysis, I found that there are no medium or large ecommerce platforms designed specifically for construction material reuse and recycling. The main ecommerce options found that occasionally feature reused materials are large-scope marketplaces like Ebay, FaceBook Marketplace, and Craigslist. There are no medium to large sites specifically available for construction.

  • 3. The End Goal: Making Re-Use Convenient

    The world cannot be changed without changing our thinking. My goal is to lessen the perceived inconvenience of re-using materials by creating a platform for home-owners and contractors to find specific materials for their projects and for sellers to easily find a home for those old materials.

The Process

I began this project by researching the marketplace and brainstorming for my product name and pitch. I created personas and empathy maps to better understand the user and guide my decisions throughout the UX design process. BuildWell came to life through the exploration of wireframes, journey mapping, contextual interviews, A/B testing, prototype testing, and iteration. Below you will find my highlighted process.

User Persona for 'Ryan Acker'

Understanding and Visualizing the User: Meet Ryan Aacker

Ryan loves the outdoors and engaging in creative tasks. He is motivated by helping his family prosper, and with that follows his appreciation for low prices and convenience. He cares about those around him and his environment.

 

Mid-fi Design

Pictured here is the mid-fi design of the item purchase flow created in Figma. Following user testing, I removed the social media icons at the bottom because they used valuable screen real estate and users were frustrated by accidental button activation. On the home page (top-left screen pictured), I replaced the buttons with a hero-image.

Hi-Fi Prototype

Successes, Challenges, & Opportunities

I learned a lot from this project — from definitions to processes and software — I am proud of the growth I made’. In addition to learning more about UX, I was able to develop an intuitive purchase experience for the user after several tests and iterations.

The challenges within this project included changes as simple as renaming buttons to be more clear to users, along with more complicated processes, such as designing the sorting and filtering within the purchase user flow.

This project could live forever. For my next steps within BuildWell I plan to create a design for desktop and begin working on a user flow for the seller’s side. Along with these updates, I hope to make some more minor aesthetic changes to my current flow to ensure better adherence to current accessibility industry standards.