Help­ing peo­ple become more eco-con­scious with­out mak­ing them feel guilty: that was the goal of the social net­work we designed for Brighter Plan­et, which went into pub­lic beta on 16 July 2009 and ran for sev­en years.

To define the user experience, first define the user

Like all social net­works, this one was about about com­mu­ni­ty: build­ing, shar­ing, and fun. And like all social net­works, it served all kinds of peo­ple. In this case, it served any­one on plan­et Earth with an inter­net connection.

How do you design a user expe­ri­ence for every­body? The answer is, you dont. You design for key types of peo­ple, let­ting their ener­gy and activ­i­ty evan­ge­lize and build the net­work. (Flickr.com, for exam­ple, appeals to every­body, but was ini­tial­ly designed for casu­al ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phers and pas­sion­ate hob­by­ists. Face­book was orig­i­nal­ly for col­lege stu­dents. Twit­ter was an inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions tool that ini­tial­ly attract­ed an ear­ly adopt­ing audi­ence of web nerds, and now main­ly appeals to jour­nal­ists, celebri­ties, and publicists.)

Work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with Brighter Plan­ets mar­ket­ing and devel­op­ment leads, we iden­ti­fied two key user groups: pas­sion­ate­ly com­mit­ted envi­ron­men­tal­ists (deep greens), and ordi­nary folks who cared about the envi­ron­ment but wer­ent going to ditch their cars or switch off their air con­di­tion­ers any time soon.

The social net­work had to work for both groups. It had to be pro­found enough to sat­is­fy the deep greens, yet fun and light enough (not to men­tion cus­tomiz­able and respect­ful of pri­va­cy) to appeal to the casu­al environmentalist.

Our design process, begin­ning with detailed stake­hold­er and user inter­views, led to the con­clu­sion that casu­al envi­ron­men­tal­ists (moms, pro­fes­sion­als, small busi­ness own­ers) would work best as our pri­ma­ry tar­get. A site that worked for them would work for every­onein­clud­ing deep greens. Where­as a site tai­lored main­ly to deep greens would very like­ly per­plex and turn off casu­al environmentalists.

Science and Soul

At the core of the new social media net­work was a tool that let users cal­cu­late an accu­rate car­bon foot­print for their fam­i­ly or busi­ness. They could then off­set this foot­print by fol­low­ing con­ser­va­tion tips or pur­chas­ing car­bon off­sets. We sim­pli­fied the expe­ri­ence of choos­ing car­bon foot­print com­po­nents and enter­ing data, and inte­grat­ed the car­bon pro­fil­er into the entire site expe­ri­ence. This enabled a casu­al envi­ron­men­tal­ist to add to her pro­file as the oppor­tu­ni­ty arose, while giv­ing a deep green the abil­i­ty to spend hours fine-tun­ing her footprint.

If an in-depth, accu­rate car­bon pro­fil­er was the heart of the net­work, con­ser­va­tion tips were its social soul. We designed them to be easy to write, easy to browse, easy to rate; they should be as quick and easy as dash­ing off a Yelp or Foursquare review. Mem­bers could fol­low oth­er mem­bers, give them a thumbs up for com­plet­ing a con­ser­va­tion tip (such as installing a low-flow show­er head in one bath­room), and, of course, obses­sive­ly edit their Profiles.

In par­al­lel with the user expe­ri­ence explo­ration, we devel­oped a light con­tent strat­e­gy that sup­port­ed the sites tone and goals. After the net­work was envi­sioned and refined in exquis­ite wire­frame detail, we craft­ed a low-key look and feel designed to sub­tly con­vey eco­log­i­cal themes, add an ele­ment of play­ful­ness, and wear well over the long haul. Its not a knock-you-in-the-face look and feel, but a design to be lived in, for years to come. And for sev­en years, folks did just that.

Zeld­mans team worked tire­less­ly to under­stand Brighter Plan­ets needs and those of our cus­tomers. They were instru­men­tal in help­ing to shape our con­cept, voice and audi­ence, and as a result, craft­ed a mag­nif­i­cent archi­tec­ture and design.
Adam Rubin, CTO, Brighter Planet

Climate Change You Can Believe In

Brighter Plan­et helped peo­ple take con­trol of their envi­ron­men­tal foot­print: mea­sure their cli­mate impact, dis­cov­er sim­ple ways to reduce it, track their progress, and share their expe­ri­ences with oth­er peo­ple who who want to make a dif­fer­ence. We were proud to play a part in bring­ing Brighter Plan­ets vision to life.

But like most start­up busi­ness­es, Brighter Plan­et was a gam­ble and fold­ed after sev­en inspir­ing years. You can no longer expe­ri­ence the site we cre­at­ed, but you can read about it here.

Our responsibilities on this project

Strat­e­gy; research; user expe­ri­ence; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; inter­face design; front-end development.