GARA: A Mobile App that helps build sustainable communities
A climate action mobile app designed to help families reduce energy use and foster sustainable communities.
This project showcases my UX design thinking and UI design skills and my leadership abilities in driving creative vision.
Duration: 6 weeks
My contribution: Lead the project and provided overall direction and strategy, UI designs
Team: 4 designers
Challenge
Eco-conscious families often feel isolated in their sustainability efforts and struggle to find effective ways to reduce household energy use. The goal was to design an engaging, community-driven experience that makes climate action feel approachable and rewarding.
Solution
To address the challenge, we designed GARA, a mobile app that empowers families to reduce energy use through 30-day community challenges, real-time energy tracking, and gamified progress rewards. The app’s intuitive UI, featuring bright visuals and role-based dashboards, fosters engagement and a sense of belonging, making sustainability efforts approachable and rewarding.
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
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