Simplifying Carbon Data Entry

For climate metrics, The Nature Conservancy needed to better understand how the work was making an impact. Reporting progress was complicated fo the reporter who typically didn’t understand climate science. 

We designed a reporting mechanism that would calculate progress based on the NCS pathway, location, and spatial extent. 

The result was a workflow that seamlessly blended with our current outcome metrics reporting tool and that noticeably improved usability, and thus adoption of the tool. 

My process

After extensive usability testing with internal data administrators, climate scientists and data reporters, I designed a workflow using Figma that simplified the complex process and broke it down into easily managed chunks: 

Screen 1: Choose a Metric, a Pathway and an Intervention;

Screen 2, Choose a spatial extent and location;

Screen 3: Use standard NCS data or custom data and calculate the target value

Why it worked

The new design enabled data reporters to choose the NCS Pathway from a drop down. Conditional logic helped them complete the form. I built into the design increased flexibility for teams who were more savvy with their carbon calculations and wanted to use their own formulas rather than the one we hard-coded using standardized data.  

Our survey responses from data reporters showed a 55% increase in confidence when entering carbon data.

The Nature Conservancy wanted to better understand progress  it was making in 10 unique outcome metrics across our global strategies.  

Conservation leadership wanted clear indications of when to pivot a strategy, when to abort a strategy and when to stay the course.

The problem was, most of our progess data that was available to senior leadership was difficult to find and share, and didn’t support this level of decision making. 

My process

I interviewed project teams across the globe to understand their process for recording data, who was recording the data, what level of knowledge they had, and what information was missing in existing reporting mechanisms. 

I then started designing a series of MVP workflows in Figma and put them through rigorous task-based usability testing. I gathered all the feedback in remote, recorded sessions and used Miro to lead collaborative sessions with conservation leadership. We categorized the user feedback using afinity diagrams and prioritization exercises to  build a strategy to tackle the important items. Most of the feedback centered around disconnects between how the tool structured information and how data reporters, project teams and strategy leads considered data at the local level. 

Why it worked

By making small label changes and adding minor help text and functionality, we made our conservation teams’ jobs easier. Data reporters especially appreciated that: 

1. An editor may choose to update the record status to Active, Canceled, Inactive or Completed. 
2. Users with permission to edit a record, would see an enabled edit button and were able to edit any fields or whole sections of the record. The View Record button toggles to Edit Record when in view mode. 
3. Only admins are authorized to delete a record so this button would not show for general users.
4. Every field included help text to assist data reporters in completing the field. As this was a new process, our help text database was extremely useful to new users. 
5. Rich text formatting helped them create more readable descriptions and goals.