Making sustainable travel feel rewarding
A student project with a team of five, designing a platform that turns choosing the train over flying into a rewarding, points-earning habit.
Summary
Working with a team of four other students from CHAS Academy, I helped envision and design a digital platform to encourage more sustainable public transportation. Our proposal: a webpage that rewards people for taking the train on trips inside the Nordic countries, earning Greenpoints redeemable for future trips or products.
We followed the five stages of Design Thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
Research & interviewing
Our first challenge was identifying what actually stops people from choosing trains over flights, and how a digital product could remove those obstacles. Interviews and surveys surfaced four key findings:
- People struggle to rate their own environmental impact: some overestimate how eco-friendly they are, others underestimate it.
- Price, travel time, and convenience are the biggest obstacles to choosing a greener alternative to flying.
- A motivational scoring system (earning vouchers for greener choices) was received positively.
- Pain points to avoid: being redirected to another booking site, too many stops in a journey, and carbon-emission data presented without context or education.
We built an affinity map from these findings and identified five behavioral types (Planner, Inspiration seeker, Sustainability savvy, Price hunter, and Newly arrived) which we clustered into three categories to guide our strategy.
Prototyping & development
Based on the research, we developed Ecotrip: a booking system for trains between Nordic countries designed to make sustainable travel easier to choose.
The product shows travelers how much carbon dioxide their trip emits, building awareness of their environmental impact. Booking through the platform earns Greenpoints, which can be redeemed for vouchers, turning a values-based choice into a rewarding one.
