The carbon tracking app for Gen Z

Starting off right

Liv’s team chose Moze for project development. They asked us to design an excellent user experience and take care of the full-stack technology development, to arrive in a Lean way to an initial public release.

We initiated the collaboration by conducting a Co-design Workshop, our process devised after years of experience in accompanying entrepreneurs to design a new digital product and make the critical choices for its development. Through a series of understanding, mapping and prototyping sessions, we arrive at defining the high-level user experience and key technological features of the product, along with an indicative development roadmap.

Co-design Workshop: how it works, when to use it.

In talking with Liv’s founders and JUV Consulting, a New York marketing agency specializing in Gen Z, we realized that to help people be more aware, the best thing to do is to start with their habits. Rather than asking the user to manually enter a large amount of information, Liv wants to make the most of data that is already commonly available to each of us: that related to transactions made with payment cards. The basic idea is to allow people to know how many kilograms of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) their spending translates into. The second insight of Liv’s team was to make available to users of the app a catalog of physical products, made by brands that declare their relative emissions value.

Tech

We chose Expo, a React application framework, to build the client app used by users. Expo extends React Native, a software library originated in Meta (Facebook) to develop native mobile apps from a codebase written in JavaScript.

What is Expo and why to use it in iOS and Android app development.

For the back-end, we chose Node.js, a JavaScript-based runtime environment for building flexible and scalable network applications. The modular cloud architecture and serverless functions of Node.js aim to provide flexibility in increasing the capacity of computational resources as the volume of users increases.

We organized the work in sprints: iterative work cycles of predetermined duration. Starting with an initial roadmap, we developed the different features incrementally, sprint by sprint. This Agile approach, which we always recommend for digital innovation projects, allowed us the flexibility to adjust the project scope when unforeseen elements (technical or business) arose during development.

Fixed budget project? Sprints are better.

Making the app: the Liv Score and Stats

To create an excellent UX, we focused our attention on the easiest way to enable CO2-equivalent consultation from one’s spending. The Liv Score offers qualitative data (the mascot’s expression, which is also the icon of the app) and quantitative data (the amount of CO2e relative to the last seven days).
The user can drill down by consulting the analytical section of the app, where he or she can find all the details about pollutant emissions by time period (weekly, monthly, and yearly) and by spending category.
If the estimated consumption for a transaction is found to be inaccurate, the user can change the classification category, specify the number of people to whom it relates (e.g., if he or she has treated friends to dinner) or the time period of reference (e.g., in the case of energy utilities).

The Product Finder

The user can explore the catalog of goods that have the CO2e indication made known by the brand. The easiest way to discover a new product is through the use of categories and subcategories, or through text search with autocomplete.

An important focus of Liv is to give people a tool to motivate brands to share the carbon footprint of their products. Within the Product Finder the user can specify a request for a product and brand not in the catalog, the app then generates a widget that can be shared on social media, tagging the brand directly.

Private beta and the App Store

We learned a lot from this experience. Liv’s team came up with a tool that can help people take more control over their consumption-related choices and adopt a lifestyle that is more mindful of the challenges posed by climate change. We helped them realize their idea by designing and developing an app aimed at the younger generation.

After the app was launched in private beta, we listened to the very first users, trying to gather feedback useful for improving the product.

In early 2023, the app was finally released on the stores of seven countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany.