Student Project

A healthier planet, one leaf at a time.

Forest Friend

Forest Friend is a mobile app that turns sustainable daily actions into care for a digital plant. It is an eco-accountability app that helps users visualize and reduce their carbon footprint through a simple gamified system.

Role: UX Designer

Tools: Figma, Figjam, paper, pencil

Duration: 8 Weeks

Many people want to live more sustainably, but carbon emissions feel abstract, difficult to measure, and easy to ignore. Even when users are aware of sustainable practices, they often lack daily accountability, positive reinforcement, and simple tools to track their impact.

The problem

BRAnding

Color Palette

Font Used

Logo

Research and Insights

Mid-Fidelity Prototype

SOLUTION

Forest Friend - See the change you make

The goal of Forest Friend is to make environmental impact visible and actionable through gamification. It aims to help users understand their daily habits, like travel and food choices, through simple visuals, empowering them to make sustainable changes that keep their digital ecosystem thriving.

Key Features

  • The Living Dashboard (Visual Impact)

    Environmental data is represented by a digital plant mascot and a circular, animated progress bar that surrounds your plant. It provides users with immediate "glanceable" feedback.

  • Categorized Emissions Breakdown

    Specific tracking for Travel, Energy, and Food with color-coded progress bars to show users exactly which lifestyle area needs the most adjustment.

  • Community Garden

    Allows users to join forces with friends, schools, or local organizations to visualize their shared progress.

  • Actionable Steps

    Provides users with challenges and goals to achieve to increase their progress and impact.

Takeaways -

Building Forest Friend from the ground up taught me that UX design is less about aesthetic choices and more about strategic problem-solving. By conducting my own research and user interviews, I learned to move past my own assumptions and uncover the the emotional friction that prevents people from tracking their carbon footprint. This experience sharpened my ability to translate complex data into "glanceable" visual hierarchies and taught me how to manage a project's lifecycle, from identifying a core pain point to designing a scalable, community-driven solution. Ultimately, this end-to-end process shifted my focus from simply asking "what does this look like?" to "why does this exist?", reinforcing that a designer’s true value lies in bridging the gap between daunting global challenges and manageable human actions.

If I had more time, I would have conducted a second round of usability testing specifically on the 'Community Garden' flow to see if users felt motivated or pressured by the social features.