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Silva

Incentivizing sustainable habits through gamification

Role
UX research, product validation & prototyping
Year
2021

Silva is a concept for a mobile app that helps people track sustainable actions, earn rewards for eco-friendly habits, and learn more about sustainability along the way. I worked on a team of four, focused on UX research, product validation, and prototyping.

Five redesigned Silva screens, tilted on a soft green gradient: Learn, the Go veggie! challenge, the home dashboard welcoming Sophia, a beach clean-up event and her profile.

The Problem

Many people want to build sustainable habits but don’t stick with them. Their efforts feel too small to matter, and there’s no clear way to track impact or stay motivated.

The Goal

Design an app that makes sustainable action trackable, rewarding, and educational, built around the idea of collectively reducing ecological footprint.

Research

We analyzed existing sustainability and habit-tracking apps to identify patterns worth keeping and problems worth avoiding, and spoke with environmentally conscious individuals to understand what motivates and blocks sustainable behavior.

Two Strategyzer test cards testing whether the customer segment is interested in sustainable practices and knowledgeable about sustainability, by interviewing the segment.
Two Strategyzer learning cards: interviewees make small, inconsistent sustainable changes, and recognise the urgency but feel their knowledge is limited.
Word cloud of reasons for becoming sustainable, led by conscious consumption, environment, climate change and health reasons.
Pie chart of the most important app feature from 18 responses: all of the above 38.9%, rewards 33.3%, tracking efforts and impact 22.2%, learning about sustainability the rest.
To what extent would you say you (try to) act sustainably?33 responses
To what extent would you like an overview of your sustainable actions and their impact?33 responses
To what extent would rewards (discount coupons, badges, etc.) motivate you to become more sustainable?33 responses
To what extent would you like to use an app to learn about sustainability, track your impact, earn rewards and meet others?33 responses
Early value proposition canvas for a digital learning platform with challenges, rewards and tracking, mapped against pains such as feeling insignificant, no constant motivation and difficulty seeing personal impact.

Pain Points

  1. People feel their actions are too small to matter
  2. There’s no structured way to track impact
  3. Existing incentives don’t hold attention

Personas & Journey Mapping

  • Persona 1, The Conscious Consumer: someone that wants to reduce waste but needs motivation.
  • Persona 2, The Curious Learner: someone interested in sustainability but unsure where to start.
  • Persona 3, The Eco-Champion: someone actively sustainable but seeks a way to quantify impact.
Persona of Sophia, a student aged 18 to 28 in Rotterdam who wants to see her ecological footprint, learn, earn rewards and feel part of a sustainable community.

Target group

Persona

Profile

Education level: educated young people

Target group: students (BA, MSc, PhD), city dwellers

Gender: all genders, with a particular focus on women

Personal motivations

  • Social desirability
  • Healthy lifestyle
  • Feeling part of a community
  • Thinks climate change is a problem that needs to change
  • Cares about animal welfare

Personality

  • Sustainable thinking, sustainable doing: a proactive attitude
  • Enjoys challenging themselves to be a better person, personal growth
  • Empathetic, conscious person

Lifestyle

  • Thinks their own behaviour influences climate change
  • Practices sustainable habits (turning off the heat and lights, eating less meat)
  • Busy lifestyle

Customer 1

Geographic: Dutch, Netherlands

Demographics: highly or just educated, young people, women, city dwellers

Behaviour

  • See climate policy as important
  • Turn off the lights, wear more clothes to turn off the heat at home, use bikes and public transport, eat less meat
  • Open to changing their lifestyle for a good cause

Customer 2

Geographic: Dutch, Netherlands

Demographics: high school education or no education, older people

Behaviour

  • Not knowledgeable about individual sustainable practices
  • Not involved in sustainable habits
  • Unwilling to change their lifestyle

Value Propositions

We defined two sides of the business model: a B2C proposition for students practicing conscious consumption, and a B2B proposition for sustainability focused partner brands.

B2B value proposition canvas for partner organisations: sponsored green events, in-app advertising and green team building, addressing CSR goals, advertising costs and employee well-being.
B2C value proposition canvas for conscious consumers: a free app with impact overview, challenges, rewards and learning, addressing guilt, lack of knowledge and not seeing personal footprint.

Wireframes & Design

Low-fidelity wireframes let us test the core functions early. The final prototype covers onboarding, a home dashboard showing user progress, an interactive challenges and events section, a sustainability education area, and a profile and rewards system.

Low-fidelity home screen: a profile with badges, progress tiles for CO2 cut and plastic recycled, new challenges such as biking to university, and a sponsored challenge.
Splash screen with the Silva logo: a hand holding a leafy tree inside a circle.
Home dashboard welcoming Sophia, with current challenges Go veggie! and Unplug, and an overview of plastic recycled, water and energy saved, CO2, animals and waste.
Challenges tab filtered to Easy, showing the Go veggie! challenge with a fact about water use for beef versus vegetables and a Start button.
Events tab with a sponsored Beach Clean-up in Den Haag, partner logos and a 15% restaurant discount reward, with a Join Event button.
Learning area with categories Conservation, Plastic and Plants, and recommended content: an Ocean literacy article and a Climate change video.
Profile screen for Sophia with name, email and a grid of earned badges, medals and trophies.

Visual Design Pass

Revisiting Silva in 2026, I gave the final screens a visual design pass. The flows and content stay the same, but the screens now use one typeface instead of five, a consistent green colour system, cleaner cards, and a soft gradient background in place of flat white.

Redesigned splash screen: the Silva logo in a white circle on a soft green gradient, with Get started and I already have an account buttons.
Redesigned home screen: a greeting for Sophia, challenge cards for Go veggie! and Unplug with Tap! buttons, and six photo tiles showing her impact.
Redesigned challenges screen: a Challenges and Events switch, difficulty filters, and a Go veggie! card with the water fact, a tip and a Start challenge button.
Redesigned events screen: a search field and a Beach Clean-up card with date badge, location, sponsors, a 15% restaurant reward and a Join event button.
Redesigned learn screen: photo tiles for Conservation, Plastic and Plants, and recommended cards for an Ocean literacy article and a Climate change video.
Redesigned profile screen: Sophia's photo, name and email, an account card, and her 16 earned badges.

Reflection

  • The research held up. Grounding the concept in real interviews and a clear problem-solution fit meant the design decisions had something to point back to, rather than being aesthetic guesses.
  • Branding needed more attention. With four of us focused on research, strategy, and UX simultaneously, visual identity was the area that got the least development.
  • Layout hierarchy could go further. Spacing and information hierarchy across screens is something I’d tighten with more iteration time.
  • Performance wasn’t tested. If this were built, I’d want to work with engineers early on speed and accessibility rather than treating it as a later concern.