Conscious Consumer

The Problem

Indirect pressure based on purchase of everyday items is a large driver of extinction, but many people are not aware of the extent to which their purchases drives extinctions on a global scale.

Our Proposal

We plan to use existing data on conservation and wildlife issues to drive audiences to change their purchasing behavior when shopping online. Our tool is a Chrome browser extension that alerts, notifies, and then educates users about sensitive key-terms on ecommerce product pages that relate to conservation issues. This will help steer consumers towards more sustainable and ecologically friendly products. Since online shopping is a huge segment of the economy, we hope this method will maximize our impact on improving conscious consumer behavior.

We Assume that...

We assume that people use the chrome browser on a large scale. Chrome is one of the most popular browsers out today. Chrome is a favorite browser, with 59.69% of the market share.

We assume that we'll have a significant impact by targeting English speaking consumers that are using ecommerce. English speaking e-commerce sales is a significant portion of the economy today.

We assume that people know about the Chrome extension store, and are willing to use a browser extension. The majority of Chrome users install and use extensions through the Chrome extension store.

Constraints to Overcome

Lack of awareness on behalf of the consumer is a huge barrier for conservation efforts. Many consumers simply don't know how their purchasing habits impact the environment, and animals within it. Similarly, many consumers simply don't have the time to search through long ingredient lists and descriptions for any number of ingredients that might be problematic. Even if they do take the time to do so, it can be near impossible to remember every single ingredient out there that might be an issue. We hope to give them an easy, time saving tool, that passively alerts users when there might be a problematic ingredient. It saves them time, and effort, while also enabling conscious, conservation oriented purchasing behavior.

Current Work

Our product is currently available on the Chrome extension store. We've done preliminary user experience research to validate our prototype and concept, but would like to continue researching to improve UI/UX. We would also like to add more problematic ingredients, so our extension can do a more thorough job. We would also like to incorporate categories, so users can opt-in and out of bigger categories such as veganism, etc, and allow users to control what terms are tracked based on their preference. We have some basic recommendations in place for each ingredient on our website, but would like to expand on that and recommend more detailed solutions, maybe by informing users of products they can use as a substitute. We've also considered searching out affiliate deals, specifically while recommending alternate products. We would also like to add more intelligent programming. We might want to differentiate between certified sustainable and non-sustainable palm oil, for example.

Current Needs

We will need funding and people for: -UX research and UX/UI refinement -QA testing -Research new ingredients and keywords to add to the tool -Marketing resources -Potentially creating affiliate deals