Offshoot: From Small Acts to Second Nature
A warm and welcoming space where neighbors and city dwellers can build community and personal habits around consuming less. The app is named after an offshoot, which is a small new plant sprouting from a bigger one. 🌱
Main Accomplishment:
Product Designer with a team of 2 other designers
Built three key features focused on motivation and engagement, including My Plants & Rewards, habit management, and local sustainability events
Achieved a 2.5 out of 5 (1-easy to 5- difficult) user testing score, indicating generally positive user feedback
Project Summary:
Timline: September - December 2025 (15 weeks)
Deliverables: End-to-end design process from research, ideation, Design, and Testing.
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Figma Slides
Target Device: Mobile App
What is Offshoot?
An offshoot is a small new plant that grows from the base of a larger one.
Like an offshoot, we see Sustainable habits as starting from small actions and growing into something meaningful over time..
Three highlight screens from the app
Grown the plants in greenhouse with rewards
A gamified system that visually represents users’ sustainability efforts through plant growth and rewards. By completing habits and community activities, users earn and nurture plants in their greenhouse while also gaining motivation from viewing friends’ greenhouses and shared progress
Track Sustainable Habits
A simple and intuitive habit-tracking experience that allows users to create, log, and manage sustainable practices in their daily lives. The feature emphasizes ease of use and clarity, helping users build consistency while keeping the experience simple and approachable.
Community Impact
Discover and participate in nearby sustainability events and community challenges. This feature connects users with like-minded people and makes it easier to take real-world environmental action at the neighborhood level.
Each activity earns rewards that directly support the growth of plants in the user’s greenhouse
So, who uses Offshoot?
Offshoot is for individuals looking to build sustainable habits at their own pace through small actions, community engagement, and visible growth.
Then, who might be the top users?
Those who feel that sustainability is overwhelming without guidance, and needs small, clear steps. With a busy schedules, those who struggle to stay consistent unless something actively nudges or reminds them.
♻️+🏃💨
“I often start sustainable habits but lose momentum quickly”
“I’d engage in sustainable practices at a pace that’s most comfortable to me”
“I’d like to meet people in the neighborhood and do good things together.”
The Problem
People living in urban environments often want to adopt more sustainable habits but find the process overwhelming without clear guidance, motivation, or access to the right resources. With busy schedules and limited time, it can be difficult to know where to start, which actions are realistic, and how to stay consistent. Without visible progress, encouragement, or easily accessible community resources, sustainability can feel inaccessible rather than achievable, causing many to lose motivation before habits can fully form
After talking to the users…
Some common insights we were able to find
5/7 participants were not sure where to start
6/7 participants feel empowered by their peers and community
6/7 participants struggle to stay on top of good habits
How can we define this problem?
Reduce friction by introducing sustainability through small, manageable actions
Offer clear guidance to help users understand where to start and how to progress
Support consistency for busy lifestyles with gentle structure and reminders
Build motivation through visible progress and achievable milestones
Keep sustainability approachable by allowing users to participate at their own pace
Make sustainable habits feel approachable, motivating, and easy to maintain by guiding users through small actions, visible progress, and shared interests.
The Solution
So, What if…
This solution is to try focusing on supporting people living in busy cities turn sustainability into something that feels easy, social, and fun. Instead of overwhelming users with big lifestyle changes, it encourages small, everyday actions that naturally fit into their routines. Seeing others make progress, sharing wins, and staying connected adds a sense of motivation and energy. With light rewards and ongoing feedback, sustainable choices start to feel less like a task and more like something worth coming back to.
How are others doing it?
Deliver familiar habit-formation through gamification
The competitive analysis explores how existing habit-tracking and sustainability apps use gamification to encourage repeat engagement. Apps such as Finch, Habitica, and Water Llama rely on reward systems like progress bars, visual feedback, and inventories to motivate users. This analysis helped identify common patterns as well as areas where our product could differentiate and improve the experience
Finch
Water Llama
2. Promote motivation through community
Most apps limit community to being offered either fully online or in-person. Our product bridges this gap by blending both to encourage sustainable habits.
Earth Hero
Habitica
Finch
Habitica
Visualizing
With inspiration from competative research in mind, we then really started to think about the visual branding and layout for Offshoot.
Our moodboard combines a natural palette with a splash of color.
Our style guide evokes a sense of fun and playfulness through our chosen fonts and hand-drawn illustrations.
Protoype Process
Bringing all of our ideas together through the prototyping process, we identified key components from our competitive research and also referenced event-based apps such as “Eventbrite” to help shape the layout of the Offshoot app.
We started with sketches for lo-fi, then build it into mid-fi, and brought it to life in the hi-fi designs.
Testing it Out
After giving a scenario did 6 user testings with four different tasks.
We tested participants in age range of 20-30s living in urban settings to identify existing gaps and problems in our designs.
1.Record completion of habit
2. Add a new habit
3. Join a community challenge
The Results
After testing, we created a stoplight chart to consolidate insights from all user testing sessions. While most ratings leaned toward the easier end, we identified three key issues that needed to be addressed in the final designs.
4. Find a friend’s activity to join
What were the Insights?
“It was annoying to switch views from friends to my profile to check which plant I didn’t have”
Users didn’t know what plants they owned
In this flow, users had to compare their greenhouse with their friends' to figure out which plants they had yet to own.
Improving the discoverability of unowned plants
We added an informative popup and a lock icon to indicate which plants the user does not yet own. This allows users to understand what they still need to collect without switching views, reducing unnecessary back-and-forth.
“I thought the Community icon was the Friends page because the icon looked like a friend”
Confusion with navigation icons
Users expressed confusion with navigation icons and struggled to locate key pages like the Friends tab, the Habits page, and the Community page from the navigation bar and landing page.
Adding clarity to our navigation
We renamed the confusing tabs and added clear labels. We clarified the navigation by renaming tabs and adding labels so users can easily find Friends, Habits, and Community tabs.
“Because there’s a sun, I assume it’s weather and the water droplet is humidity”
Cache Iconography misunderstanding
There was confusion with Cache Iconography. Users did not understand the meaning of cache resources like sunlight and water because they resembled icons in their weather app.
Cache Bank Redesign with Improved Iconography
Redesigned the Cache Bank icons to be visually unique and to align better with the Offshoot theme
“How do I redeem my resources, in ‘Your Events’?”
Unsure how to redeem rewards
Users were also confused about how community event rewards were received. They did not expect to redeem the rewards in the history tab
Rename tab and rewards redeem method
Rewards are redeem instantly after an event is completed/or the time passes, followed by a flash message.
The History tab was also renamed to Past Events to make the tab’s purpose clearer.
Coming back to the big question
We revisit our original challenge of making sustainable habits in a busy city feel simple, social, and rewarding, and reflect on how our final design supports those goals in an approachable and engaging way
So, where did we arrive at?
Final Designs
The Greenhouse
Grow with your plants
Upon entering the app, users land on the Greenhouse/Home Page. This helps users follow the growth of their virtual plant and take care of them. This feature helps address our initial issue of a lack in motivation.
Habits
Community Challenge
Quick Action Suggestions
The greenhouse page also offers Personalized suggestions for habits and community events. This feature helps users by giving them a quick add function and a place to start.
Instant Wins for Habits
Another feature we designed to address our initial problems was a page for creating and tracking personal sustainability habits. To address the challenge of feeling unmotivated, users are immediately rewarded each time they mark a habit as complete. If a habit needs a slight tweak, users can also create or edit an existing habit to better meet their needs.
Redemption Upon Joining Challenges
Like habits, Offshoot also supports user motivation by encouraging engagement through community challenges! Users have the opportunity to gain even more rewards for going outside and building sustainable habits in community with others.
Connect with Friends
Another feature we designed was the Grove, a neighborhood view of all the users friends laid out in a fun and interactive way. This feature helps users connecting with friends and addressed the issue of finding community and accountability.
Curated Starts
For the barrier of "where to begin", Offshoot provides a set of pre-curated habits for users to pick from. To prevent users from feeling overwhelmed with options, users can choose to refresh their recommendations for more inspiration. Additionally, Offshoot personalizes recommendations based on users indicating what they are or are not interested in.
Discovering Community Challenges
Not only does our community challenge page support users in finding friends, Offshoot also recommends events to begin one's journey towards an environmentally sustainable lifestyle.
Conclusion
Offshoot shows how thoughtful design choices can reduce barriers to adopting sustainable habits in busy urban environments. By focusing on ease of use, motivation, and meaningful connection, the experience turns complex sustainability goals into small, actionable steps. The final design reflects insights from research, testing, and iteration, highlighting how intentional UX decisions can encourage long-term engagement and behavior change
Offshoot helps sustainable habits take root by turning small everyday actions into lasting growth
