GARA: A Mobile App that helps build sustainable communities
Gara is a mobile app designed to help families reduce their energy usage and build sustainable habits through engaging community challenges, real-time energy tracking, and gamified rewards. This project allowed me to demonstrate my skills in UX design, UI design, and leading a team through a design challenge with a real-world impact.
Duration: 6 weeks
My contribution: Lead the project, UI designs, User Testing
Team: 4 designers
Challenge
Eco-conscious families are often passionate about sustainability but struggle to find accessible ways to make meaningful changes in their household energy use. Many feel isolated in their efforts and lack the resources to track and reduce their energy consumption effectively. The challenge was to create an app that could empower these families by fostering a sense of community while making it easier to reduce energy use in small, manageable ways.
Solution
To address this challenge, we designed Gara, an app that encourages families to take action by participating in 30-day sustainability challenges. These challenges are designed to make daily energy-saving actions feel small and achievable, while also providing real-time energy tracking that connects to smart meters. The app features gamified progress rewards to keep users motivated and engaged.
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The core design principles focused on making the experience encouraging, inclusive, and convenient. To support family participation, we created role-based dashboards so that each family member could see how their actions contributed to the overall goal. Bright visuals and intuitive UI were essential to make the app feel engaging, while interactive elements ensured that users felt a real sense of accomplishment.
Approach & Insights
Through research, we discovered that children play a pivotal role in influencing household behaviours. This led to our core design principles:
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Encouraging – Motivating small, daily energy-saving actions.
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Belongingness – Fostering collective participation.
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Convenient – Seamlessly integrating into daily routines.
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Assurance – Providing clear impact feedback.
Key Features
Family & Community Challenges
Users participate in 30-day energy-saving challenges, making small daily changes that lead to long-term impact.
Progress & Rewards
Interactive progress tracking and community achievements encourage continued engagement.
Design Solutions
The app’s UI was crafted for simplicity and engagement, utilising bright visuals, gamification, and accessible navigation to keep users motivated. Storyboarding and experience prototyping ensured the design aligned with real user behaviours and motivations.
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​The app integrates with smart meters and energy tracking tools to provide real-time feedback on individual and household energy savings. Users receive visual insights on their impact, comparing their progress to community benchmarks and past performance.
Design System
UX Vision - A sense of belonging
We believe, there is an opportunity to design a mobile app for parents in their fifties who are passionate about the climate change problem that encourages them to take further action and connect with their community about a sustainable future effectively, overcomes their worry about a sustainable future for future generations so that they experience a sense of belonging and feel it is not a lonely war anymore.
Experience Prototyping
We conducted experience prototyping to understand how the app’s features would perform in real-life scenarios. This helped us identify gaps in user engagement, refine key functionalities like the 30-day challenges, and ensure the app aligned with users’ needs for minimal interaction while fostering a sense of community.
Storyboard
User Testing
For usability testing, I reached out to professors and professionals in the environmental department, as well as individuals passionate about sustainability. I recruited 13 participants for an online testing session where they interacted with the app prototype.
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During testing, participants were asked to perform tasks like setting up a challenge, tracking their energy use, and exploring the community features. Feedback was collected through surveys and follow-up interviews.
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The key takeaways were:
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Challenge Setup: Users appreciated the concept but found the initial setup process a bit unclear, especially with language and navigation.
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Dashboard Confusion: Some users weren’t sure how to track their personal versus community progress.
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Energy Feedback: While real-time data was helpful, some felt it was overwhelming and needed to be more digestible.
Based on this feedback, I simplified the challenge setup, redesigned the dashboard for better clarity, and streamlined the energy feedback to make it more user-friendly.
Impact
The final design not only improved the user experience but also contributed to the app’s ability to drive real behavior change. Post-launch testing revealed that families were more likely to stick with energy-saving habits because the app provided continuous feedback, reinforced through gamification.
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In fact, the community challenges became a significant feature, encouraging families to participate in group efforts to reduce their overall household energy consumption. This sense of shared accomplishment helped families feel less isolated in their journey toward sustainability.
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By making sustainability feel more engaging and less daunting, Gara turned climate action into something families could feel proud of and actively involved in.