Design MVP in 6 month

CarbonGraph startup has set an ambitious goal to make the world carbon neutral by 2050. To do so more companies are striving to become aware of the carbon footprint of their products. Carbon emissions occur at every step of a product’s lifecycle, and thus knowing the carbon footprint of a product means collecting data from its entire supply chain from raw materials to consumers. My objective as designer was to create a Web platform for companies to discover and share the carbon footprints of their products.

kickoff

Understanding Fundamentals and Objectives

To start designing product I need to be familiar with science behind products carbon footprint and understand fundamentals. I have conducted interviews with stakeholders and advisors to better grasp my objectives as well as did reading and research to further deepen my understanding. Here I have listed key takeaways from my research:

Carbon emissions occur at every step of product’s lifecycle which is distributed in 5 steps as following according to GHG protocol:
- Upstream -refers to emissions occurring during material acquisition and pre-processing.
- Production - referred also as scope 1 and 2 emissions, emissions that happen during production of product.
- Distribution & Storage -scope 3 downstream emission happening during storage and distribution of product.
- Use -scope 3 downstream emission happening during use of product.
- End of life -scope 3 downstream emission happening during use of product.
Within scope 3 companies and their product are interconnected those to calculate emission of one product we need to consider carbon footprint of other products connected by product supply chain.
CarbonGraph platform should help companies to search for suppliers with lowest carbon footprint and without disclosing company’s production graph. CarbonGraph will serve as guarantor for accuracy of this data.
Users should be able to share their carbon footprint on their website as CarbonGraph embed option, therefore final data output should be exportable.
Companies should be able to communicate with each other and be able to request data for carbon footprint and CarbonGraph is serve as medium for these communications.
Need for company dashboard UI with carbon footprint metrics.

discovery

Problem with manual data entry

After conducting research on competitors and conventional solutions on the market, and interviewing customers I have discovered main problem of design.

Current tools aim to improve experience of Excel data entry for carbon accounting, generate visual graphs and reports but do not avoid self reported data entry of carbon emissions. This leads to several other problems:

Lack of transparency and validity of the data
Need to manually input data from third parties
If one node in data changes users have to manually update rest of the products downstream, which can cause in consistency errors.
If one of the users upstream report inaccurate data to minimize their carbon emissions, and it would be hard to verify accuracy of this data and it would lead to inaccurate results of carbon emissions downstream in this node.

define

Product Centric Approach

To address these problems I wanted to design carbon accounting software with “Product Supply Chain” in mind. To allow companies to visualize their supply chain and corresponding carbon footprint within our software. This would allow users:

Dynamically generate their carbon footprint data per product in a company
Search for suppliers within CarbonGraph data base with minimum emissions
Discover and Share carbon footprint data with other companies in a product supply chain.
Audit and verify their data with CarbonGraph

To With these key principles in mind, I have began on ideating on solution by drawing new UX journey map and early wireframes to verify with users and stakeholders. carbongraph chart

persona

Tesla Inc, as UX persona

Taking into consideration that CarbonGraph is a B2B SaaS company, main users of the product would be businesses that wish to track CO2 emissions at each step of the product-life cycle, persona defined as a legal person. As a user legal entity representative creates an account with CarbonGraph and can add their products to CarbonGraph database. I used Tesla, as a sample company with made up data and Elon Musk as representative of Tesla creating products on CarbonGraph and designing User Experience around it.

"All information posted in designs is solely for visual design and demonstration purposes. It is not intended to represent real emission values of companies ,organizations, and their corresponding products. All data values presented are made up and serve for demonstration purposes."

Design

CarbonGraph B2B SaaS platform

I have start my design process by plotting Information Architecture for an App. For purposes of MVP design we have decided to focus our design of proof of concept by creating prototype of Node Editor.

View Prototype carbongraph chart

Assets & design system

The

End

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