Offshoot: A Sustainability Habit App
Busy young adults living in NYC, want to discover environmentally sustainable opportunities that they can easily adopt into their daily lives. This project asks how we can make adopting environmentally sustainable habits in a busy city simple, social, and rewarding.
Project Type
Digital Product Design
Role: designer & researcher
Timeline
September- December 2025
(14 weeks)
Tools
Figma & Figjam
Where it all began
For my Digital Product Design graduate course, we were tasked by our professor to create a new product of our choice. With my teammates, Keertana Gunnam and May Kim, we started by brainstorming topics that were interesting, relatable, and ultimately, would be helpful in our personal lives.
Our interest started at the topic of food waste and composting, two topics that we all agreed were important, yet we each embraced them in our daily lives in varying and inconsistent ways.
This led us to wonder how we could uplift a social cause, reducing waste, and on a larger scale, environmental sustainability, and motivate ourselves and others to take action.
What are we trying to solve?
Our team hypothesized that most people didn't regularly engage in environmentally sustainable practices due to multiple factors, including time, resources, and/or motivation.
To validate our assumptions, we created the following problem statement to guide our journey forward:
How might we make adopting environmentally sustainable habits in a busy city simple, social, and rewarding?
Follow our process
Empathizing to learn, what's the real challenge?
Barriers to entry: uncertainty, influence, and motivation
We interviewed 7 urban residents across the US in their 20's-30's. All users had little to somewhat previous experience with practicing environmental sustainability. We found that:
As one user put it:
“I fall off my healthy habits pretty quickly. But, when I compare my step count or exercise activity with my friends, it gets fun!”
Defining our audience
Meet Tom
Tom is a busy and social salesman who recently moved to NYC. Tom would like to be more environmentally sustainable, but needs clear guidance and structure to fully begin.
Tom's Journey:
Tom's journey begins when he receives an unexpectedly high energy bill. He realizes he needs to take action, but doesn’t yet know what that action should be.
Tom’s journey revealed three key needs to design for: clear guidance, accountability, and ongoing motivation.
Ideating towards a solution
Brainstorming ideas
We leveraged multiple brainstorming methods to develop Offshoot. Through mind mapping, we developed our concept of using different resources (such as water, electricity, and gas) to define how users would earn resource-related plants.
Lightning demos visually summarized what we liked in other apps, and the SCAMPER method helped us consider substituting water drinking from Water Llama with sustainable habits.
Lastly, we utilized the MSCW method to begin defining the features we wanted to prioritize in our final product. For example, we made sure our app would allow users to add, manage, and track their actions.
What competitors are doing
Industry standards: deliver familiar habit-formation through gamification
The utilization of gamification or a reward system is a standard practice for encouraging users to return to the app. Competitors leverage reward systems through features such as reward inventories and progress bars to promote instant gratification and positive reinforcement.
Opportunity: promoting motivation through community
Many of these products limit the community to being offered either fully online or in-person. Our product bridges this gap by blending both to encourage sustainable habits.
From these insights, we wanted our app to feel approachable, ensuring that the path towards environmental sustainability felt achievable, approachable, and fun.
A reminder of the problem statement
Busy young adults living in NYC, want to discover environmentally sustainable opportunities that they can easily adopt into their daily lives.
Final features
Feature 1
Greenhouse
Visualize user growth through the maintenance of virtual plants. As users progress through their journey, they're awarded plants to collect and continually earn resources to feed their plants by completing habits and challenges. Users can also find their friends in-app and connect through The Grove.
Impact
Users are rewarded for making progress and staying motivated. Users also get inspiration by visiting their friends' greenhouses for habits they can adopt.
Feature 2
Habits
Track, manage, and get rewarded on your journey to building sustainability habits over time. Additionally, Offshoot provides a set of pre-curated habits for users to pick from. To prevent users from feeling overwhelmed with options, users can choose to refresh their recommendations for more inspiration. Additionally, Offshoot personalizes recommendations based on users indicating what they are or are not interested in.
Impact
Support users who may need a push to get started, or who don't know where to begin their environmental sustainability journey.
Feature 3
Community Challenges
Users have the opportunity to gain even more rewards for going outside and building sustainable habits in the community with others. Like habits, Offshoot recommends events tailored to your interests and area of residence.
Impact
Users find community offline and gain motivation and suggestions for how to get started.
User Testing
To validate our designs, we tested our prototypes with 6 users over Zoom. Each user received four tasks to complete.
Findings highlighted that although we had a high completion rate and users rated tasks on the easier end, challenges with our workflows and designs could be improved (reference the stoplight chart below for further details). Of the eight identified issues, we addressed four.
Users wanted quick discoverability of plants they didn't have
Our app affords inspiration for further action by showing the plants and app activities of their friends. If a user wants a plant that their friend has, they can visit their greenhouse to check. Initially, this would have relied on users navigating back and forth between the two greenhouses, creating cognitive overload. By adding labels to a friend's plant, users know right away where to focus.
Users seek a clear navigation
Testing also highlighted the confusion of overly relying on icons for navigation in our tabs and navigation bar. To address this challenge, we used labels for our tabs and added in labels to our navigation bar. This adjustment also offers greater accessibility for individuals relying on a screen reader.
Misunderstanding arose over cache icons
Our original reward cache for feeding greenhouse plants was made up by a sun and water droplet. Unfortunately, many of our users viewed our cache icons as representing a weather widget. To address this finding, we reselected icons that better represented the purpose of the cache - resources for feeding collected plants. Additionally, by changing the container of the cache, we hoped to better convey the idea of a resource bank or cache.
User confusion in redeeming rewards
Lastly, our testing found that users could not determine how to collect rewards after joining and then attending a community event. To address this challenge, our team decided to allow users to be rewarded right away for joining an event and provide an instant, flash notification of earned rewards for immediate user feedback.
Introducing
Offshoot
An offshoot is a small new plant that sprouts from the base of a bigger one.
Like an offshoot, we see Sustainable habits as starting from small actions and growing into something meaningful over time. Offshoot provides a warm and welcoming space where neighbors and city dwellers can build community and personal habits around consuming less.
What the users say so far
Our project was presented to our professor, class, and two industry professionals. Reactions were overwhelmingly positive, with audience members highlighting the warm and humanity our product brings. One professional highlighted the fun world we built, making them want to collect as well. Despite the success with pitching Offshoot, we still have work to do.
"I love The Grove map. It's even more fun to see what others are doing and influence each other. It makes the app what it is - building sustainable community."
"The aesthetic was nice, and everything was intuitive. I like being rewarded with virtual plants for doing good things - I like the positive reinforcement."
Next steps
Expanding our scope
In the long run, we'd like to broaden our product to ensure that even the most seasoned practitioners can grow. We'd like to diversify our habit recommendations to include high-impact, advanced lifestyle shifts, so that Offshoot provides the right 'resources' for both the first-timer and the lifelong practitioner. Feedback from our presentation highlighted an opportunity at looking at indirect competitors such as Facebook running groups, Reddit, and community gardens for inspiration.
Integration with real-world impact
We recognize that a large motivator to become environmentally sustainable is an awareness of the impact that one's actions make. With the limitation in time for this project, a future expansion of Offshoot would prioritize this design of this feature.
A safer community
Lastly, with our emphasis on building community in-app and in the real world, we understand that a sense of safety will need to be addressed. Particularly for in-person community challenges, safety measures must be considered for both hosts and participants. If in-app messaging is pursued, security and reporting measures will need to be incorporated as well.