ClimateHub
An interactive platform designed for Biotopia Museum, connecting Uppsala citizens to transform passive climate awareness into collective action.
Duration
Feb - Mar 2026
Client
Biotopia Uppsala
Context
This project was developed with a team of five for the Interaction and Service Design course.
My Roles
Strategy Planning, Workshop Facilitation, UX Design, Interaction Design and Prototyping
The Challenge
Biotopia Museum in Uppsala plans to establish a branch called “ClimateHub” to engage city residents on climate issues and educate them purposefully on climate action. The administration is seeking strategies to expand its outreach.
Climate education can feel overwhelming: Climate change is an intense topic. For users, small actions may seem insignificant, leading to feelings of hopelessness and uncertainty about where to begin.
Biotopia needs an audience shift: Biotopia aims to expand its audience beyond children and their parents/teachers to include a broader range of age groups, particularly young adults.
The physical area has limited capacity: Due to the museum’s limited space, the solution should connect users to off-site, urban-scale events without relying on museum space.
Research and Design Process
We started to explore the key issues with this main research question:
How might we encourage citizens of Uppsala to take action against climate change through the ClimateHub?
These sub-topics expanded our research:
A - How can we design a digital solution to keep users motivated, “hooked,” and engaged?
B - How can we make climate knowledge more approachable and less intimidating?
From user research to high-fidelity prototyping, the project was structured over six one-week design sprints. We developed our collaboration with the client and design stages into three main pillars.
Triangulated Discovery: Grounded our strategy through direct stakeholder communication, an audit of their existing efforts, and an on-site evaluation of Biotopia visitors' interactions.
Academic Research: Rooted our design decisions in academic research on gamification and behavioral science to support long-term user retention.
Thematic Analysis: Translated research outcomes into a matrix of "requirements, needs, and wishes" to ensure feasibility within technical and time constraints.
Peer Workshop: Facilitated an ideation workshop with fellow designers and developers to brainstorm interactions and feature integration.
Strategy 1
Nudge, don’t compete: Breaking climate actions into simple, rewarding micro-tasks (ClimateQuests) is necessary to simplify the learning process. But instead of implementing competitive leaderboards, UX should focus on the individual climate-learning journey to prioritize intentional learning.
Strategy 2
Extend the physical space: With the curation by Biotopia, creating a digital archive of events and articles would bridge the gap between experts and the community, and expand the museum's physical access.
Strategy 3
Allow Customization for Different Personas: A 16-year-old high school student and a 30-year-old PhD candidate have different life commitments and practices, but they are within the same definition of Biotopia's target audience. A customizable experience would allow this broad audience to tailor their learning journey based on their daily habits.
Strategy 4
Eliminate Access Friction: Building a Progressive Web App (PWA) would help combat the "app fatigue" of users. By removing the barrier of app store downloads, we also ensure immediate, cross-platform accessibility and offline support for users on the go.
Initial Concept and MVP
ClimateHub is a digital platform designed to guide Uppsala residents to take collective action by translating complex climate information into digestible milestones through "meaningful gamification." The concept focuses entirely on personal progress and peer encouragement, and intentionally excludes toxic gamification elements such as leaderboards to prioritize intentional learning over competition.
Key Features:
ClimateQuests: List of micro-actions as challenges to learn about sustainable daily living.
Badges: By completing quests, users earn rewards and are informed about how they contributed to climate action.
Creating Events and Challenging Friends: Users can challenge their friends and send suggestions on events and quests to ClimateHub.
City Connection: News updates on local initiatives and a calendar for events Biotopia and the Municipality host.
Mid-Fid Prototype and User Testing
After preparing a mid-fidelity prototype with Figma, we wanted to put our assumptions to the test. Our primary goal was to validate the service's purpose and ensure the mechanics appealed to Biotopia’s goal of reaching a young adult demographic.
Asset: Mid-fidelity Figma prototype
Method: Remote moderated testing via Zoom + Semi-structured interview
Participants: 6 active tech users living in Uppsala, aged from 16 to 30
Crucial insights from these tests shaped our high-fidelity prototype. Key findings included:
The social structure of the application should be enhanced
The Friction: Users rated their interest 3 out of 10 if they used this service individually, but 8 out of 10 if their friends were involved. The initial design was not successful at showing community dynamics: users had to manually visit a friend's profile just to see end-goal badges. Their friends' actual progress was completely invisible, and this was described as "discouraging".
The Solution: Greater visibility into peer activities and community dynamics. Multiple flows and sections were improved holistically to emphasize the sense of community.
(New feature) Friend Feed: A new central feed was introduced to display friends' completed tasks and badges in real time to spark inspiration.
Improved Profiles: User profiles were updated to display upcoming events users are attending (visible only to mutual friends for privacy).
Social Notifications: The notification center was expanded to include friends' updates alongside personal alerts.
The visual layout of "ClimateQuests" should be optimized considering cognitive load
The Friction: The initial long-scrolling quest list overwhelmed users and made it hard to scan.
The Solution: Replaced long-scrolling lists with horizontal scrolling and tabbed categories for faster browsing.
"Challenging friends" should encourage users, not stress them with deadlines
The Friction: The initial prototype was guiding users to "create an event with friends to do a task together." This created unnecessary social pressure, and participants strongly preferred asynchronous participation over fixed deadlines.
The Solution: Replacement of the "creating an event" feature with a flexible invitation model. Users can now send a quest to a friend; once they accept, it drops into their ClimateQuests list to be completed at their own pace.
Final Solution
ClimateHub App
Interactive, community-focused app for Uppsala citizens with the purpose of achieving a climate-conscious lifestyle, individually and collectively.
ClimateQuests & Badge System
Rather than lengthy educational tutorials on climate responsibility, small, digestible climate quests guide users to take immediate action and learn about their environmental impact in real time. These flexible quests feature customizable frequencies and no rigid deadlines, allowing users to build personalized task lists that fits their own daily routines.
Final Solution
Friend Feed & Social Features
Through the feed, users can track their friends’ progress, celebrate shared milestones, find inspiration for their next quests, and directly challenge friends. By making community interactions visible, the social factor of the service builds encouragement and supports long-term retention.
ClimateEvents & ClimateNews
To bridge the digital platform and the physical world, these sections draw on the expertise of the Biotopia team to curate a high-quality, easy-to-digest selection of articles and a catalogue of public events.
Under ClimateEvents, users can discover local workshops and seminars hosted by Biotopia and the Municipality, reserve spots, and invite friends. Users can also suggest specific event topics, providing Biotopia team with valuable data to shape their annual/seasonal event planning.
ClimateNews serves as a localized online resource featuring Biotopia’s research updates, expert articles with examples from Uppsala, and news on Uppsala’s environmental topics and the Municipality’s climate actions.
What I Learned
Project management needs to align with limitations flexibly
While we implemented Scrum, we quickly realized rigid sprints can bottleneck design discovery. I learned the critical skill of adapting project management frameworks to serve the context, rather than forcing the design process to fit the framework.
Social Connection > Solo Gamification
User tests revealed that users would only use the app in the presence of their friends. In the first iteration, the social features were not visible as desired, making the app feel like a solo task list. We revamped the design by making social features easily accessible and enhancing interaction with friends' activities.
Small actions matter in user paralysis
During our workshop on climate education and our discussions with Biotopia, we found that the root of climate paralysis in individuals often lies in the belief of their actions are insignificant, and the information provided is too overwhelming. Breaking actions into manageable steps and bite-sized pieces of information was the core UX philosophy of the product.