Waste Warrior - Capstone Project
As a member of the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, I was required to complete a capstone project to earn my BS in Informatics. My team, Team 34, designed and developed an Information System and corresponding front-end user solution correlating to this year’s theme: Connections! From idea conception to final deployment, my team and I created Waste Warrior using our skills in foundational research, UX Design, responsive web design, information infrastructure, and usability testing to deliver an experience solution that was as positive for our users as it is for the environment.
What is Waste Warrior?
Climate change is an irreversible issue on track to go over the deadly threshold of 4 degrees fahrenheit by 2100 AND has already detrimentally impacted the lives of millions, including survivors of the recent Hurricane Helene.
IF individuals can incorporate more sustainable practices in their everyday life to help reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, THEN the effect of climate change can stay under that deadly threshold BUT, adding sustainable habits to users daily lives and maintaining them can be difficult.
THEREFORE, we have created a platform that encourages users to practice sustainability through gamification by helping users track their sustainable efforts, see how they compare to others in the area, and find more ways to integrate these habits into important areas of their life, such as their diet, consumption, and waste.
Initial Research Findings | ABT Statements | Initial User Research Findings | User Personas | User Stories | Epics | ERD / Database Design |Wireframes | Prototypes | SCRUM Reports |
Final Platform | Usability Testing Findings | Informational Video | Informational Poster
Deliverables
Process
After 2 weeks of conducting our foundational research, we decided to narrow our scope and focus on sustainability as a whole. Once we completed our foundational research for our project idea, we found 2 main pain points for users: it is difficult for them to make a consistent habit of adopting sustainability habits, and there was a lack of engaging platforms that encouraged users to adopt these habits. With this new understanding of the issue we needed to target, we decided to gamify the platform to solve both of those issues!
Scope and Focus
User Research Findings and Personas
With a better understanding of what the market was lacking and type of solution that would work best, we needed to gauge our target audience’s familiarity with sustainability and technology to design a user-centered solution.
I was in charge of designing a survey with screener questions, quantitative responses, and qualitative responses.
Once we collected our goal number of responses, I organized the data in an Excel sheet and explained the findings to the team.
Using the findings, my team members and I created 4 personas based on the 4 main demographics of responses we received from the survey.
User Stories and Epics
After finalizing our personas, the team created 8 epics and 15 user stories to encapsulate all the tasks our users want and need to do on our platform.
The epics are general overviews about what the different elements of our site would be and what the function of the element was. In the example provided, we created a log for users to enter information about their recycling habits.
The user stories are much more zoomed-in and detail the specific tasks a user wants to do using a specific element, as well as what defines a useful solution for this desired task.
With the epics and user stories created, I led the team in sorting the user stories into the epics and attaching them to the previously created personas
Database Design and Information Infrastructure
Once we decided what elements we wanted to include in our platform, it came time to decide how we were going to structure our database.
Everyone on the team was required to draft an ERD of how they would structure the mySQL tables. I was responsible for analyzing every solution to design our final model.
After team approval, I set up our mySQL database with all the proper tables, columns, and connections with temporary sample entries to use while programming.
Branding, Wireframing, and Prototyping
The final step before coding and building the actual platform was to design general outlines for what we wanted our pages to look like.
To successfully design our wireframes, we needed to create on our branding and logo. Our team used Adobe Illustrator to design our Waste Warrior!
Using Figma and all the colors from our brand pallette, our team designed low-fidelity prototypes and come up with general layouts and feature designs for the pages.
After all the preliminary work, building the platform was a smooth process. I helped the team organize 2-week sprints and acted as team Scrum Master as well.
We detailed which person would be responsible for what epic and additional tasks if applicable. We did 4 check-ins per sprint to monitor progress mid-week and at the end of each week.
My team used GitHub to independently build epics, and would use our final sprint meetings to merge branches and update our working repository in our host server, and finally tested the entire working platform to make sure no new issues occurred as a result of the merges.
Building the Platform with SCRUM
Usability Testing
For our usability testing, we decided to go 2 routes: formal user testing conducted by a team member and asynchronous user testing.
For our formal user testing, we had 20 volunteers complete 7 specifically designed tasks under our supervision.
The asynchronous testing, we had a group of 10 volunteers interact with our platform for a week and fill out a survey about their experience. We also provided an additional form for them to fill out about any bugs they noticed.
We completed 2 rounds of testing before the final deployment of the platform.
The Final Version
After 10 months of hard work, the team was finally done with the website in late April 2025!
The platform was complete with 3 static pages: home, about, and team. We also created a login/sign-up system both independently and with a Google API. The interactive features included 4 different logs: food, clothing, transportation, and recycling. In addition, we designed a reminder page to unplug devices/shut off lights that was connected to Google Calendar, and an education page featuring several sustainability thems quizzes. To see how they ranked globally, amongst friends, and independnetly, we had a leaderboard too.
What makes Waste Warrior special is the social aspect. Users are able to customize their profiles with pre-selected profile pictures and add friends on the platform to grow their community,
Communication
A big part of a successful product is being able to communicate it to stakeholders and users. We designed both an informational poster and an insutuctional video for the site.