The recycling bins redesign contains a lot of valuable and interesting information. In particular I think your interviews with actual people around MIT provides depth and information into the problems.

(1) The actual interviews seem to add a lot more to the site than the overall persona groups, making me wonder if the user personas are needed. I wonder if guests may read the user personas and come away with less motivation as they may identify as a utilitarian who cares about recycling or a post-doc who cares. I think the interviews are very well done, and contain similar material to the personas page.

(2) Your introductory pages contain a lot of good information (I actually had a friend walk by and carefully read through the MIT recycling infographic as he wanted to know what he could recycle at MIT). With this abundance of material with both data from the US as a whole and info from MIT, the reader might not be sure which population you have chosen to focus on. I think clarifying on the first page that you are choosing to look at recycling at MIT as your topic could help the reader better know what to expect.

Overall, I think this site contains lots of valuable information, and you have successfully taught at least one more person about MIT's recycling system!

return to top of page

Great in-depth analysis. I liked the photos, personals and user-interviews. The only things I think might need rethinking is the re-design, which seems complex and over-engineered (though cool), and maybe the website organization - it would be helpful to have a "next page" button at the bottom of each page. But overall, fantastic job!

return to top of page

This review was incredibly thorough, and it is evident that a lot of work was put into it. The perspective of multiple users was considered, and the recycling bins across campus were represented well. A lot of thoughtful insight was provided into how the recycling system at MIT could be improved, and I appreciate how your observations were split into different classifications (visual, auditory, etc). The photos that accompanied the analysis really drove the major points home. Overall, this was an incredibly effective and thorough analysis.

return to top of page

This is an excellent topic and a thorough analysis of that topic. I think it was an interesting approach to conduct all of your primary research first and using that to define what the user needs are (and the classes of users) rather than using secondary research to define those needs. The primary research was also quite thorough and clearly took time to compile. I also learned about how MIT handles waste, which was fun.

My first improvement suggestion is that the proposed redesign may not align with user needs as well as it could. Specifically, I'm concerned that adding electronics to the bins creates a failure mode for an item that should be quite durable (durability was given an importance of "4" while digitization was only given an importance of "2"). I'm also a little worried that the trapezoidal dimension of the bins could limit the usable volume as recyclables may fail to pack into the corners or may make the full bags hard to remove.

I think it's very reasonable to limit your human-user analysis to the people pitching recyclables into the bins, but custodial staff is another very important user, and one which may have an even heavier influence on design! If you were to revisit this analysis, it may be interesting to include their perspectives.

return to top of page

Overall the design of the Recycling Bins site is very nicely laid out and text is made larger or bolded to emphasize. The tabs are easy to navigate between, and the pages contain a good mix of pictures and text to make them easy to read.

(1) On the User personas page the personas are clearly laid out from best at recycling to worst at recycling, and are color coded accordingly. They each also have a rating for "motivation to recycle" and "recycling knowledge". The scales are have a nice gradient to them, however since the first persona maxes out both of these scales the gradient makes it a little confusing where she is supposed to lie on these scales. To clarify this for first time readers one might be able to create a pointer to mark where each persona falls on the sliding scale.

(2) The reference page contains many links to further information, however there is a little extra activation energy required on the users side as the links are just text and not actually links. If the links could be made clickable the user might be more likely to read more about recycling after reading your site.

Overall, the website is fairly clear and presented in an interesting variety of layouts to keep the reader engaged.

return to top of page

Good website, clean and fairly well laid out. Maybe put a little more thought into the way you organize the elements so there's more information hiearchy. Some more white-space may also help with readability.

return to top of page

The website was very well-done and easy to navigate. Visually, it was incredibly pleasing and used images well to communicate the argument. The formatting was clean and easy to follow.

return to top of page

The website was extremely easy to navigate, and it was aesthetically pleasing. The flow of the story as I clicked through the tabs from left to right was easy to understand. There was also a great amount of visual content which broke up the text and made it easier to read.

I had one issue where I couldn't get the 'User Experience' tab to load properly on my PC and needed to go to a smartphone to view it. I tried the page several times with several monitors and failed each time (until using my smartphone). I'm not sure what the source of this glitch would be.

return to top of page