The Be Bright mobile app puts real-time energy tracking in your hands—monitor the consumption and cost of any appliance in your home, not just smart ones. See exactly where your energy goes, from individual devices to your entire household, and take meaningful action. It’s not just about tracking usage—it’s about making a relevant contribution by offsetting your carbon footprint with a tap. Be Bright lets you pay to plant trees that sequester the equivalent amount of carbon over a year, turning awareness into impact.
Low Awareness of Real-Time Energy Use:
Most users don't know how much energy their appliances use, especially non-smart devices.
This makes it difficult to identify high-consumption culprits or understand overall household energy behavior.
Inability to Translate Awareness into Action:
Even if users are energy-conscious, they often lack simple, accessible tools to take meaningful action (e.g., offsetting their footprint).
Disconnection Between Energy Use and Environmental Impact:
Users may not associate their electricity use with carbon emissions, or they may feel powerless to do anything about it.
Lack of visibility and agency over household energy consumption and carbon impact.
Be Bright offers a seamless and empowering way for users to take control of their household energy consumption and environmental impact. Through real-time tracking, the app monitors the energy use and cost of every appliance—even those that aren’t smart—giving users a clear, detailed view of their energy footprint. By making this data accessible and actionable, Be Bright helps users identify inefficiencies, understand their usage patterns, and make informed decisions. Most importantly, it bridges the gap between awareness and impact by enabling users to offset their carbon footprint directly through the app—planting trees with a tap to sequester the equivalent carbon emissions over the year. This turns passive consumption into proactive climate action.
I used surveys and interviews which contributed hugely in addition to my own findings from the desk research.
Using insights from the surveys and interviews, we identified common behaviors and pain points—like the need to reduce energy costs, lack of appliance-level visibility, and concern for environmental impact. By merging quantitative and qualitative data, we created a user persona that captures the key motivations, challenges, and goals of our target users. This persona now guides product and design decisions to stay aligned with real user needs.
This project began as a design initiative for a startup aiming to tackle energy awareness and climate action through a user-friendly mobile app. The initial designs were created to support early-stage fundraising—clearly articulating the user problem, the proposed solution, and a compelling product experience despite constraints like the absence of a UI designer, tight deadlines, and reliance on a UI kit for quick turnaround.
The lean but focused design approach helped the team craft a clear product vision, backed by user insights and an MVP-level prototype. After several rounds of pitching, the startup successfully secured funding, validating both the product idea and the design’s role in communicating its value. The project has since moved into active development, with future design iterations expected to deepen user validation and elevate visual execution.
Pragmatic UI Design Approach in a Resource-Limited Context
With no dedicated or senior UI designer on the team, we took a hands-on approach to UI design—making high-fidelity decisions collaboratively and leveraging an existing UI kit to accelerate implementation. This allowed us to move quickly and maintain consistency, though it naturally came with some limitations in terms of creative exploration and visual refinement.Limited Time for Deep Iteration After Lo-Fi Testing
Tight deadlines allowed only a single round of low-fidelity prototyping and usability testing. Although early insights shaped the direction, we lacked the time to explore deeper refinements or re-test high-fidelity designs.Strong Emphasis on Speed Over Depth
With time as the primary constraint, the project leaned heavily on an MVP mindset. This enabled us to ship quickly, but some areas were intentionally left for future improvement and optimization.
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