Overview

This challenge was carried out by IT and business students of HM and TAMK (Tampere) in cooperation with Karmacom GmbH, an agency for CSR related topics and sustainable communication. With this challenge, Karmacom wanted to expand their focus to the B2C market with the idea of a non-profit app to encourage especially young people to think about a more ecological future.

Problem

Facing the climate crisis is usually accompanied by threatening scenarios that make people feel powerless and therefore quickly take their motivation to try to do something against them. This happens, even though human interaction and behaviour changes are the keys to protect the earth from further overheating. Moreover, it is considered a very abstract topic. The effects can already be felt, but politicians often talk about goals and measures in a way that is difficult to understand without scientific background knowledge. In addition, hearing that certain threatening events are usually to be expected a decade or two in the future, many people do not want to think about what could be changed now.

Furthermore, there is so much new information on climate change published each day, that many people ask themselves: Which information is fake and which is legitimate? The idea that the team of students was supposed to implement to address these problems was a multiplayer quiz called “TipTabToe” that operates on giving positive and non-judging impulses to its users on what they could personally do against climate change. The vision of “TipTabToe” is to guide people to a climate-friendly lifestyle in a playful and motivating way.

Approach

The team TipTabToe ("the 4T") used the “CIL Solution Delivery Approach”, which combines design thinking and agile solution development, as well as Working Backwards, the design thinking approach by Amazon, and the SCRUM® Methodology to work on their final product. Before the 4T started working on the Innovation Approach, they had to analyse the client Karmacom. They did this with the help of a stakeholder analysis that helped them to better understand the solution that they were expected to deliver.

With the “5 Working Backwards Questions”, the team did further research on their customer group and documented all the important facts about it. This strengthened them in their choice, since they found out that Generation Z, containing people aged 16-25, was very interested in topics like sustainability, health, and well-being and that an app would be the perfect product to catch its attention since it consisted of digital natives only.

From this information, an empathy map was created and students used the creative tool "Crazy 8" under the guidance of the AWS coaches to develop further approaches to support the basic idea of a multiplayer quiz app. The result of this was that the app should have a community aspect, which would make it possible to exchange tips and tricks with community participants. Challenges should also be included. Here, the competitive approach in the game was further supported.

Another idea was to involve the players in the creation of questions. This meant implementing a function that would allow them to share their own ideas and interesting topics and thus help shape the content of the app in a user-oriented way.

In addition, the students had the idea of linking the online game world with the offline world. Since the goal of the app is to steer the user's behaviour in a sustainable direction, they decided that the reward for reaching game levels should be coupons or points that could be redeemed, for example, at a nearby unpackaged store. This way, alternative actions to common behaviour could be recommended directly to the player and the awareness of sustainable retailers could be increased.

The next step was to visualize the problem and the user's journey to the solution. For this visualization, the students chose to create a storyboard. To announce the app, the 4T wrote a fictitious press release.To deliver the app, the students used the SCRUM® methodology. They divided into a SCRUM® master, a product owner (PO) and the development team. The development team consisted of three information technology (IT) specialists and four business specialists. They then went through five so-called “sprints”.

Because of the limited number of sprints, the development of a multiplayer quiz app was not possible. The product owner discussed this information with the client and found a solution. Furthermore, the 4T asked for specified requirements. These requirements allowed the team to prioritize the user stories. By the end of sprint four, the team was able to deliver six user stories and two business specialists, who were responsible for creating the sustainable question for the questionnaire, got the approval by the client. Within the last and fifth sprint, the team was able to deliver ten further user stories and a prototype - the quiz app called “TipTabToe”.