Three times the area of Denmark. A football field every 1.4 seconds. The equivalent of a hundred large harvesters running without stopping.
Deforestation is not an abstraction and it is not slowing down. But the fix handed to a person is always the same shapeless instruction: do better.
So we started from the three things that actually work, and asked which one a phone could carry.
- 01
Save a tree where you live
Learn what affects trees, protect the ones nearby, turn up on planting days.
- 02
Change consumption habits
Reduce, reuse, recycle. The one that happens dozens of times a week, in a shop, in a kitchen, at a drive thru.
Where WeTree lives - 03
Defend the forests left
Share the love for trees, donate, join the groups already fighting for them.
People were already doing it
A literature review, a survey of 30 people, interviews and a competitive analysis. Then one pair of numbers reframed the entire brief.
More people were doing the work than said they cared about it. The behaviour was running ahead of the identity: unassisted, unprompted and completely uncounted. That gap, not apathy, was the thing worth designing for.
The third number decided the project. Not one of them had ever seen an environmental app, and when asked if one would help, half said they might try it while only one in six said yes outright: mild curiosity, not demand.
- Yes66.67%
- No33.33%
- I might try it50.00%
- No33.33%
- Yes16.67%
Two thirds already logged their lives in apps. Only one in six said yes outright to this one.
What people actually did
We asked which specific actions people took, and the ranking was unambiguous.
Note what sits at the bottom of that chart: planting a tree, 13%, donating, 3%. The grand gestures were the rarest and the small repeated ones were nearly universal, which is why the app opens on a camera, not a donation button.
What the interviews added
“Together, we can speak up.”
Collective voice felt more powerful than solo effort. Acting alone felt pointless.
“I want to see what it did.”
People wanted a reaction to an action, physical, visual or emotional. Instant feedback was the key, not a statistic at the end of the year.
“I already do this.”
The habits existed. No technology supported them, counted them or noticed them.
This was never a behaviour change problem: the behaviour was already there, invisible, unrewarded and completely private.
The competitors agreed with us, by failing
We split the field into direct competitors, who reward you for cutting paper use, and indirect ones working the same trick on plastic or aluminium. Two direct competitors mattered, and both failed the same way.
PaperKarma
Photograph the junk mail you do not want and it contacts the sender to get you off the list.
✕“Users are not happy when they don’t feel the effect.”
Ecosia
A search engine giving at least 80% of its ad profits to a tree planting programme in Burkina Faso.
✕“Doesn’t provide a link to the planted trees. Users like to see the trees.”
One photographs paper, the other plants real trees, and both lose people at the same moment: the point where you should have been able to see what you did.
Three independent sources, the survey, the interviews and the competition, pointing at one hole. So the hole became the product.
How might we make an everyday green choice visible enough to be worth repeating?
Objectives
- Raise awareness and actively encourage reduce, reuse and recycle.
- Empower people to act and track it, so effort accumulates instead of evaporating.
- Let an action travel through social media, further than the person who took it.
Where the choice already happens
Before designing a screen, we followed a single errand run end to end, from the fridge to the front door and back, hunting for the moments where a green choice was already sitting on the table.
- 01
Leaving home
Check the fridge, write the list, grab the weekend purse and the keys.
◦Nudge from GPS or a calendar appointment
- 02
Getting coffee
Drive thru on the way, order, pay at the window with the Starbucks app.
◦Log opportunity triggered by another app
- 03
The supermarket
Produce aisle, meat counter, the rest of the list, then the cashier.
◦Log opportunity at the point of choice
- 04
Getting lunch
One more drive thru, food to go, back in the car.
◦Log prompt riding on a social check in
- 05
Back home
Unpack, deal with the bags, eat, take the trash out.
◦The moment the day is finally countable
The touchpoints all landed in the same place: next to something the person was already doing, a calendar appointment, a payment in the Starbucks app, a check in at lunch. WeTree never asks for a new habit, it waits at the edge of an old one.
It started on paper
Every screen in this project began as a pencil sketch, argued over and redrawn until the three of us agreed before anything got coloured in.
Sketching first is not nostalgia, it is throughput. Bad ideas die in seconds on paper and take a week to die in a prototype.
Look closely at the second sketch, under the avatar: trees saved, badges won, amount donated. Running totals, drawn on day one, before a single pixel existed. They did not survive into the prototype, and months later, testing asked for them back.
Shoot it, sort it, share it
The whole product is one small ritual, repeated. Point the camera at the thing you just did right, and the app does the rest.
The ring around the shutter puts reduce, reuse and recycle on the capture screen itself, so you classify the act while you are still framing it. That single decision means every post arrives as data instead of a caption someone has to interpret later: a photo of a receipt becomes a reuse, countable, badge eligible, and taggable to a challenge.
- Capture
- Classify
- Caption
- Share
- Earn
Sharing outward was the point, not a growth tactic: the research said collective voice was what made people feel effective.
A feed of small, provable good
Recent
Everything posted in the last 24 hours, tagged with the platform it went out on.
History
Your own back catalogue, the cheapest honest version of a visible outcome.
Search
One field across people, posts and challenges.
My favourite accident: typing “Star” returns “Starbucks” and “Start a tree challenge” in the same list, so a search for a coffee brand can end in a commitment.
A badge is a dare, not a trophy
Badges are emblems for finishing a challenge. The rule I set was that every badge has to be tied to a task that pulls somebody else in, so the reward always points outward.
Challenges are deliberately uneven in scope: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is a Tuesday, “Save Arizona” is a campaign, and a person can start wherever they are.
Two minutes to sell a habit
An app that asks you to photograph your rubbish has some explaining to do before it can ask for anything else. So we made the advertisement too.
The spot argues the product in the same order it argues itself: the problem is enormous, your part is tiny, and tiny is fine as long as it is visible. Motion also shows the shutter dial actually being used, which testing would later ask for inside the app too.
Get in and get on with it
Social sign up sits above the form because the accounts WeTree wants to post to are the same ones it wants you to sign in with.
Three verdicts, in their words
We ran the prototype as a moderated, task by task walkthrough and sorted every response onto a three point impact scale: what follows is theirs, not ours.
- UI
Very easy and intuitive. Icons are very clear and intuitive. Easy to understand.
- The shutter dial
When I click the camera, 3 icons popped up. I liked the effects to be able to select one of the 3 icons I have seen before in the newsfeed. I like how I am coming across something familiar again.
- Final impact
Will consider using it because it keeps it simple and it feels as a game.
- Social media
The integration is very encouraging: it makes you excited and ready to share with others. The challenges with friends is a great idea to keep each other encouraged.
- Badges
I feel happy and motivated after seeing this badge. I feel like posting more images suddenly and maybe I will win more badges.
- Design
I wish the colors of the icons on top of the images were a little more prominent since they are barely visible on certain images.
- The shutter dial
I would have liked if there was a way for me to change the R after selecting it if I made a mistake.
- Badge grid
I am not sure whether the grey icons are inactive icons or whether they are active badges with information yet to be added. I feel it looks like an empty space.
- Challenges
I am not sure what awards I will win. I am not sure whether I get to play alone or with other people. I am hoping not everyone wins the award.
- Progress
It would be helpful to show a percentage for the progress or add a timeline close to it.
- Onboarding
Current prototype is missing a tutorial so the camera actions are not clear for the user.
- Engagement
I wish there was a video or something interactive on this screen to make it more interesting.
The shutter dial shows up in both of the first two columns: praised for feeling familiar, then faulted because a mis tap could not be undone. That is the single most concrete bug testing produced.
Everything else is one complaint in different words: the app was excellent at a single moment and silent about the arc, no progress percentage, no visible payout, no tutorial. Which sends you straight back to that pencil sketch: its running totals were the answer, dropped somewhere between paper and prototype, and testing simply asked for them back.
A tree that spells its own name
The mark did not start on a moodboard. We had asked the survey to describe the icon it wanted, and thirty people answered in their own words.
A large oak tree with many branches and deep roots.”
Small seed turning into a tree.”
Hand holding tree.”
Tree made of cups, straws, paper sheets.”
A tree in a trash can.”
A tree smiling.”
Image of a green leaf.”
A heart on a tree.”
Read them together and they split cleanly in two: half describe a tree that is growing, half describe a tree being rescued. We took the first half. Rescue imagery makes the user a bystander watching a disaster, and the research said these people were already participants.
The final lockup does the one thing a wordmark and a symbol usually refuse to do: it fuses them. The tree is the r in Tree. Take the mark away and the name stops working.
The canopy splits into three prongs, one for each R, with a darker leaf tucked in to carry the we.
“Logo looks like tree. The symbol We can be seen from far, which makes it easy to find.”First reaction in testing, before the app was even opened
Alignment
Every element sits on a shared line, so the wordmark and the mark read as one object.
Propositional density
The design carries more deep propositions than surface ones. The ratio is 2: each visible shape is doing two jobs.
Rule of thirds
The canopy, the sapling and the trunk divide the lockup into thirds, which is what keeps it stable when it shrinks.
The iOS kit
One palette, one icon family, one badge language, drawn so the app could grow without me redrawing it.
The palette was not a taste decision: the survey asked what colours people associated with an app for saving trees, and the answers stacked up in one order, green by a mile, then brown, then yellow, with blue a distant last.
So the kit runs green, brown and a warm orange, in the proportion people described. Green holds the chrome, nav bars, splash, the mark, while orange is reserved for anything that wants a tap: the shutter, Share, Start Now.
The badges climb on purpose. A leaf, then a sapling, then a canopy: the visual language does the counting so a number never has to.
The drawer that closes the loop
The last thing I added was a slide out profile, and the order of that list is the only opinionated thing in it. Donate sits first. Everything else in WeTree converts attention into a post, this is the one place it can convert into a tree.
Make the invisible countable
WeTree took a private, unnoticed habit and gave it a shutter button, a tag, a feed and a badge. Every screen exists to turn one small act into evidence.
The bar for success was deliberately low: if the app was useful, fun, and got somebody to take one more action than they already were, it worked.
What I owned
This was a team project. What follows is what I owned end to end.
- Wrote and ran the user survey, and synthesised it into three insights and three objectives
- Built the user journey map and located the touchpoints the product hangs off
- Designed the full iOS flow: capture, post, newsfeed, explore, challenges, badges, signup and profile
- Designed the WeTree logo, the app icon and the construction rationale behind both
- Drew the iOS kit: colour palette, icon family and the six achievement badges
- Ran usability testing and turned the findings into a prioritised improvement list
Key takeaways
- Design for the habit that exists. The strongest research finding was that nobody needed convincing, they needed noticing.
- Classify at capture. Putting reduce, reuse and recycle on the shutter turned a photo into data with zero extra effort.
- Reward outward. Tying every badge to a challenge someone else can join stopped the gamification from being about the individual.
Deliverables: user survey · competitive analysis · journey map · pencil wireframes · high fidelity iOS screens · Pixate prototype · logo & app icon · colour and icon kit · usability test findings · advertisement