The goal: Reduce gas emissions, The method: An Apple watch game.

As a part of Productdesign.tips’s competition, Sergey Havenson and I teamed up to choose a problem and implement design thinking to solve it, all in the context of the environment and positive behaviours. The following project is a personal project and is not associated with Nike in any way.

Nature provides us all with so many wonderful and useful things. But often, humans have the most detrimental impact on the environment. Human activities are responsible for almost all greenhouse gases’ increase in the atmosphere over the last 150 years. In fact, The number one largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is transportation. While Americans travel for various reasons, there’s arguably no more important trip each day than their commute to work, and It’s not hard to guess by which means most Americans do that.

Thinking about the future is an integral part of our adult lives. It is almost impossible to think about the future without worrying that our children will have a clean and healthy planet to grow up in. Air pollution carries significant risks for human health and the environment. If we want to take care of our next generation, this is the first thing we need to be concerned about, so we decided to take action.

Employees usually have different options for getting to and from work. Some commuters walk or ride their bikes to work, drive alone or carpool, and still, others rely on transit. Naturally, as we anticipate, the decision is mostly determined by distance and weather.

Employees face ‘commute mode choice’ in the mornings before going to work, on their way to/from lunch break, and back home. Their motivations might be to stay fit, save the planet, save money, be productive, and compete. Their concerns might be to be late to work, freeze or sweat, and get injured.

Our survey aims to sharpen the target audience, hear their concerns and motivations, and finally, to understand if anything would convince them to leave their car at home and take a ride or walk to work.

The survey confirmed to us that distance is a major issue. There is a certain distance that commuters don’t even consider looking for a way to commute other than their car and commuters who live a bit closer to work are willing to give a chance to other ways. Of course, there are always exceptions. If we go deeper, we understand that its not the distance as it both fitness and motivation levels that have a significant impact too. But it all starts from lack of awareness.

All of the following applications use social challenges to keep people motivated, which is great for keeping groups of friends in shape.

Our idea is more focused on offices and provides all parties at hand (employer, HR, employees) a solution that supports the effort in decreasing gas emissions.

It’s not hard to guess that Nike has the most massive member audience (28 million), therefor the largest impact, according to its Wikipedia page. Nike’s purpose states the following:

We have been fans of Nike for many years, and the vision and culture they showcase on any commercial, ad, and product description always inspired and motivated us. Nike does not sell shoes. The company, founded in 1964 and later took Nike’s name after the Greek goddess of victory, sells motivation, inspiration, and ambition. From the company’s slogan and its commercials, Nike is undoubtedly not a sportswear company.

When we researched brands that can communicate our solution the best way AND also fit the plan to its business goals, we came across Nike.

This vision is aligned with our challenge and perspective of the solution and couldn’t fit better. It almost seems like a natural move for Nike to address gas emissions in a classic dramatic and inspiring all-text commercial:

Joseph Ritter is a married 31 years old man with no kids. A true New Yorker, who lives in a beautiful apartment with his dog “Zeus”. Joseph is an employee in a successful marketing firm, with more than 100 employees. He lives 1.6km from his office. He’s a medium level tech-savvy. Usually, he drives his car to work, because he wakes up late and wants flexibility. Sometimes, Joseph goes to workout after work, to lose some weight that his wife commented on, but he can’t seem to enjoy it, although he wants to make his wife happy.

“Move to work” program by “Nike” is a social office challenge. The program allows companies with 10+ employees to participate in a global environmental effort based on daily commuting routines.

Nike will offer customized plans that include bicycles and access to a built-in feature in the NRC app to help track movement.

Every month Nike will give out new prizes according to their rewards table.

By encouraging walking or cycling commuting, offices will help reduce air pollution, traffic congestion, will boost employee job productivity, and produce tax advantages for any business.

Rewards can deliver a short-term boost, a small dosage of dopamine in your head, but it creates a dependency. The same type of boost as a good cup of coffee, who’s effect wears off in a couple of hours. And this type of motivation can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.

We combined monetary (ish) rewards to create first positive attraction to this set of challenges, but the goal can only be achieved as a team (the office participants) therefor, participants will have to develop social bonds, exceed challenges together, and develop.

“Move to work” is a new sports category in the Nike watch app. A registered user (employee) can choose each day to walk or cycle to work by choosing this in the sports category. The app measures the miles and adds them to the company’s “bank”. Each month the number of miles collected by foot or bicycle will gain the company “rewards”.

Health — walking/cycling to work proved to have many benefits for the human body and mind. (plus efficiency) 
Tax returns — as with company car tax returns, walking, and or cycling to work will provide employees with tax returns, which benefits both the company and it’s employees. 
Environment — If an average worker avoided using their car to commute just two days per week, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by approximately 1,600 pounds per year, per individual. 
Social — All of the challenges are made for all the participants. Therefore you can’t succeed on your own, only as a group. This can improve office connections and bonding, and increase the company’s culture altogether.

Low fidelity wireframes

Move to work feature will learn your daily sleep schedule and will give you a daily reminder to walk or cycle to work.

By pressing “move to work,” the app “rewards” the user with a unique countdown that includes positive information, just before they start a long walk/cycle.

When the user arrives at the office and presses stop, he\she can share the achievement on social media.

This option will allow anyone who shares their location on the way to work to see who’s close by and cheer them on as they go.

Our initial success metrics (if this was a real project), would be to successfully (functionality-wise and customer satisfaction-wise) run a demo in a chosen office (inner-city New-York or any other metropolis) and measure pre and after test walking/cycling percentage amongst the office workers. From there, we would iterate feedback, enhance motivations if needed, and test out new features and edge-cases.

The entire product design, from research to conception, visualization and testing made by Sergey Havenson (LinkedIn & Facebook) & Eden Shopen (LinkedIn & Facebook).

These are the links, articles, papers and resources we used in this project.

Stay safe, stay green. Thank you for reading.