CoCart
Overview
Connecting neighborhoods by simplifying orders
Our Prompt:
UW/UX’s designathon challenged participants with the following question:
“How might we empower communities to adopt sustainable habits that reduce environmental impact?”
My Role
Ideation, research, pitch writing, storytelling
Team
Emily Chan, Andrew Chu, Winston Zhao, Sophia Ho
Timeline & Results
5 hr designathon (Nov 2024)
1rst place winner
The Problem
There's a lot of wasted space.
3 Billion trees are cut down annually to make boxes like this.
A single parcel delivery produces emissions equivalent to driving a car for 1 kilometer.
From Amazon alone:
22 Million
Products are ordered per day
1.9 Items
inside each order
How might we empower communities to adopt sustainable habits that reduce environmental impact?
Finding the main users
To understand how to design our solution, I wanted to understand the different people who would be involved.
These people are consumers who want to order but worry about:
1
High minimum order requirements
2
High shipping fees
3
Unsecure deliveries
Competitive Analysis
Existing solutions that guided the designs
1
Uber / UberEats
Trusted drivers who deliver passengers or food to destinations
2
CapitalOne
A browser plugin that saves money with cart wishlisting
Our Solution
Connecting neighborhoods by simplifying orders
Find community carts near you
Share carts and delivery fees
Pick up packages from a trusted neighborhood host
Reflection
Focusing on one use case to tell a successful story
In past designations, I would try and talk about multiple different ways people could use our solution. This led to our pitches being roundabout and vague. For CoCart, we chose to focus on a shopper’s experience to deliver a clear narrative. Given the time restraint, this helped us communicate the value of our shared shopping system– emphasizing how shoppers saved money, simplified group purchasing, and saved waste in the process.
I’d like to explore the hosts POV
If I had more time, I would like to explore the Host’s journey further. We received several questions about the host experience. Particularly what would motivate someone to act as a cart host along with how trust and reliability could be established. Exploring trust systems such as user ratings, partnerships or identity verification in future iterations would present a more realistic solution.
Drawing inspiration from other industries
Our solution was partially inspired by platforms such as Uber and Airbnb. They helped us conceptualize the role of “hosts”. It was insightful to see how ideas from seemingly unrelated industries could help us solve our problem. Going forward, I want to be more intentional in using analogies and cross-industry thinking as a tool for ideating design problems.