Overview

Tend to your own pocket-sized Earth by learning and practicing sustainable behaviors and mindsets, supported by constructive strategies for navigating climate anxiety.

Terragotchi is a concept app researched, designed, and developed between January - May 2025 as my Capstone Project for the UX Design Masters Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, with the intent of supporting and encouraging sustainability in everyday life.

Research

• Sustainable action is made possible by environmental awareness, accessible information, personal benefit, self-efficacy, social support, and enjoyment.
• Barriers to sustainable action include lack of knowledge, social norms, personal capacity, and poor supportive infrastructure.
• (Climate) Anxiety create avoidance patterns, leading to disengagement; inaction.
• To change, or re-direct behavior, give people a compelling alternative.
• Information must be accessible (e.g. "tons of CO2" is unintuitive)
• Effective climate change messaging balances the dangers with self-efficacy

User types

• Conflicted Environmentalist — has sustainable values, established behaviors; struggles with maintaining behaviors amidst lifestyle changes, balancing ideals & reality
• Anxious Amateur — lacks strong environmental awareness, but feels they should be doing more; lack of direction creates anxiety, leading to avoidance patterns & disengagement

Opportunities

• Sustainable action and resource library
• Habit tracking and management
• Mindfulness exercises
• Gamification

Solution

Design

• Terragotchi combines a resource wiki, habit tracking, and virtual-pet gamification to support users in learning about, and consistently practicing sustainable behaviors in a fun and engaging way
• Users save behaviors from the library, log them to keep their pet Earth healthy, and complete mindfulness exercises to ground themselves struggling with climate anxiety, cultivate greater awareness, and reinforce channeling their energy into constructive action.
• Information with each action provides environmental, personal, and community benefits in accessible, bite-sized pieces, backed by trusted sources.

Philosophy

• Terragotchi treats sustainability like socioecological well-being: something that is good for people, and the planet.
• Terragotchi prioritizes positivity, because it knows that fighting for something is better than fighting against something.
• Terragotchi focuses on developing what's within each's control, because not one can do it all, but we all must do what we can.

Timeline

Problem space

Climate change, crisis and significance

Climate change is the most critical issue of our time, and the costs and threats it poses are indisputable. Whether you're concerned about pollution, extreme heat and weather, rising sea levels, depletion of natural resources, loss of habit and biodiversity, food and water security, inequality, and so on...  climate change will be felt by everyone.

We have the capacity

Our current resources, technology, and knowledge are fully capable of addressing climate change. It's a matter of applying them to the problem at hand.

Governments and private industry can each tackle climate change in their own way, but they are respectively slow and profit-driven. Public opinion and collective action can, however, through the everyday behavior of everyday people reshape the fabric of society, becoming the greatest change of all.

Alarmed, overwhelmed, uncertain

As dire as the situation is, the scope of the climate change is beyond anyone's individual capacity. Bleak forecasts bombard people without clear guidance or direction, who feel disconnected from nature and their communities, and struggle to see how their choices matter. As a result, they feel powerless, anxious, and paralyzed to act.

The role of anxiety

Anxiety is a fear of the future, and results in parasympathetic responses and patterns of avoidance. In response, people worry, which staves off the unpleasant uncertainty, but it prevents them from living in, and dealing with the present moment.

The anxiety which climate change creates is taking a toll not just on people, but the planet too.

Thesis question

What is the environmental impact of anxiety?

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Target audience

Young generations

Most people are aware of, and concerned about climate change — but none more so than young people. They are the most likely to see it as priority, are reliably aware of proper sustainable behaviors, and are likely to engage in basic, well-established sustainable practices^.

Deflection & doubt

At the same time, they are also the most likely to feel emotions like anxiety, fear, and anger. They are prone to doubt their ability to make a difference, and deflect responsibility onto elder society, who they don't believe are concerned enough, and are more to blame.

Strong foundation, aptitude

No one has more at stake than the youngest generations, and so it's critically important that they be able to navigate the crisis at hand, and have the confidence, skills, and awareness to cultivate a more sustainable society.

Our early experiences and education play a significant role in shaping our worldview, values, and behavior as adults, so its particularly important to focus on cultivating sustainability in young people.

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Problem statement

How might we redirect climate anxiety into climate action, cultivate ecological awareness, and support the development and agency of young people to define and aspire towards a sustainable lifestyle in a fun and engaging way?

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Research

Competitive Analysis

Commons

Commons is an app that connects users with sustainable brands, and rewarding them for their climate-friendly purchases if they choose to link their credit/debit card to the app. A lightweight carbon footprint calculator, limited educational material, and basic community engagement provide secondary value.

Advantages

• Card linking tracks "climate-friendly" purchases automatically
• Money directs economic forces towards sustainability
• Provides compelling alternatives without significant effort

Opportunities

• ‍Limited carbon tracker and educational material
• Actions not accessible or part of "everyday behaviors"
• Privacy/data concern sharing bank account information

Klima

Klima provides a monthly carbon-offset subscription service based on a carbon footprint calculation done within the app. You can track/monitor your impact (both emissions and offsets) and learn how to decrease your emissions with more sustainable behavior to reduce your offset payment and footprint over time.

Advantages

• Superior carbon footprint calculator design
• Low barrier to entry for climate action
• Best UI, visual design
• Strong IA / breakdown of carbon footprint

Opportunities

• Education content could be more digestible
• Content should be easier to scan
• Does provide incentive for regular engagement

One Small Step

This app helps users become environmentally sustainable and to reduce your calculated carbon footprint by teaching, developing, and tracking behaviors. This self-identified "Duolingo of decarbonization" provides guided lesson material, and a community feed for questions, support, and engagement.

Advantages

• Best resources for sustainable actions
• Incorporates individual actions into larger "journeys"
• Provides metadata (e.g. time commitment)
• Effective and interactive data visualizations

Opportunities

• Centrally focused on unintuive carbon footprint metric
• No support for climate anxiety
• Action library information architecture could be improved

Finch

A non-competitor, Finch served as a major source of inspiration for this project. Finch is an app that helps its users develop and maintain wellness practices by facilitating the setting and tracking of habits/goals.

Advantages

• Leverages human desire to nurture through virtual pet
• Gamifies, externalizes self-care
• Popular and effective with young audiences
• Positive, fun, and reward-based

Opportunities

• Lacks strong education element
• Private mental-health data restricts social features

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Literature

Published research was explored to assess broad trends in young people regarding climate change and sustainable action. Additionally, there was an interest in learning what supported action, what inhibited action, and what strategies existed to direct more positive action.

For material used for this project, please refer to the Citations.

Subject matter experts

Experienced individuals were consulted in the areas of behavior psychology and climate change communication to gain professional insight on personal motivation, and learn what made for effective education and messaging for sustainable action.

User research

User research was conducted in the form of 6 user interviews, whose participants were selected from screener surveys. Participants ranged from 20-25, each expressing high levels of concern, but varying degrees of action. I sought to better understand their sense of responsibility, their motivations and blockers, and what the most interesting angles for sustainability were.

Analysis

Notes, quotes, and insights from the interviews were compiled and mind-mapped so I could identify relationship, themes, and connections, and were progressively synthesized down until I was left with my key insights.

Research insights

Disconnection

With a lot of young people living in urban areas, they feel disconnected from the natural environment. This lack of visibility makes it much harder for people to internalize how their behaviors impact the environment.

Furthermore, people aren't naturally wired to think long-term or process large-scale problems, and environmental impacts are often difficult to quantify or intuit.

"...the problem is so like zoomed out and I'm small part of it and it's so hard to see that impact... People talk about tons of CO2... that is a meaningless metric to me."

Connection

On the flip-side, connecting with nature, feeling more in tune with the environment, is as simple as stepping outdoors, and taking a moment to be mindful of the natural world all around. Participants notes how time spent outside improves personal well-being, and they associate it with time spent with others.

"I associate the outdoors with hanging out with people and having a good time. I put those hand in hand because I normally go outside to de-stress or just take a moment to breathe."

Barriers to action

When it comes to one's personal behavior, the three main barriers to sustainable action are a lack of actionable knowledge, social norms, and one's personal capacity. More broadly, there is a significant role played in the supportive infrastructure and systems which make sustainable action accessible, or even possible.

Relatedly, convenience is a significant contributor as to whether an action is adopted, or maintained. Lastly, some people don't want to sacrifice their standard of living, or don't feel compelled enough to make a change.

"I shouldn't be eating meat... I think many of us, myself included, are just probably not willing to."

"I don't really know what there is to do."

Incentives for action

No one does anything without an incentive. So, if you intend to change behavior, you should not try to change people — instead, give them a compelling alternative. External forces can incite action, but the most sustainable motivations are personal, and positively-focused.

Information: accessible, balanced, relevant

Previously, I held the belief that negative climate change coverage was doing more harm than good by disheartening and discouraging people — but I learned that without a threat, there is no urgency.

The problem is more so that the news seldom instructs what to do about it. Effective messaging must therefore balance the dangers posed with self-efficacy, with information backed by trustworthy sources, while conveying behaviors as easy and fun.

"If someone were to tell me that every time that you throw out a battery, this happens... I'd probably be more likely to recycle batteries."

Personal benefit, growth

Sustainability does not have to be a chore — nutrition, health, well-being, social connection, better communities/systems, are all benefits of sustainable practice.

Personal growth, and the development of new skills, is also rewarding, and self-motivating. This positive feedback loop is also essential for developing self-efficacy.

"... usually when I form a habit to do something, it's because I'm learning something."

Positivity, aspiration, and agency

Each person must be entrusted to define the life that makes the most sense for them, so they have something reasonable to aspire for something. As the saying goes, without a goal, you cannot score.

"...if the version of myself that I see at the end of that is something that I aspire to be like, then like I am motivated to do that."

Fun & games

No one wants to live a life they can't enjoy, and the enjoyment inherent in an activity significantly influences interest and engagement. This can manifest as doing something with friends, or by making a game/challenge out of a task someone needs to complete.

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Definition

Users & Journeys

Drawn from patterns observed in experiences shared during user interviews, I identified two distinct patterns, which are characterized by aspiration & guilt, and anxiety & paralysis. I subsequently refer to these user types/personas as the Conflicted Environmentalist, and the Anxious Amateur.

Conflicted Environmentalist

Exhibiting aspiration and guilt, these individuals have strong environmental values, well developed habits, and are motivated improve in both areas. When things outside their control force them to act less sustainably, however, they struggle to maintain their behaviors and deal with feelings of guilt as their ideals conflict with their reality.

Anxious Amateur

Exhibiting anxiety and paralysis, these individual have low levels of sustainable awareness, which results in more anxiety when they feel they should do something to address climate change. Without clear pathways to action, they develop patterns of avoidance, or else disengage entirely.

Opportunities

Action library

• Provide broad set of actions with flexible, varied levels of difficulty
• Allow for filtering, personal relevance, ability to curate and find accessible actions
• Provide suggestions based on current habits, areas of engagement, experience

Information and resources

• Offer information on what, why, and how to perform actions, behaviors
• Compile, utilize existing resources for sustainable living
• Supply related, adjacent actions; encourage building upon existing habits

Habit tracking and management

• Easy adaptation of goals and actions
• Aid prioritizing one's energy/actions, understanding commitment cost
• Habit tracking, support, and progress visualization

Mindfulness exercises

• Navigate negative emotions; break anxiety spirals
• Foster emotional resilience
• Teach redirection of negative energy into positive action
• Encourage mindfulness, presence, and a more holistic perspective

Gamification

• Provide accountability and externalization with virtual pet
• Positive and encouraging; playful, fun, lighthearted

For notable features that ultimately did not make the final prototype, please see Conclusion > Honorable Mentions.

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Future state

By introducing these features into the scenarios of the Conflicted Environmentalist and the Anxious Amateur, we can observe how each is only only able to effectively navigate the behavioral and psychological challenges faced, but turn the situation into an opportunity for growth.

Conflicted Environmentalist

Anxious Amateur

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Design

Low-fidelity

With the journey maps outlined and features ideated, I combined them into a holistic user-flow. The color coding here represents feature prioritization.

Sketches for the necessary interface elements were then completed and incorporated into the user flow above to create the low-fidelity flow map.

Mid-fidelity

Aesthetics

With Terragotchi's aesthetic, I aimed to create something simple, playful, and practical. With a basis in education, and striving to embody positivity, I aimed towards the visual language present in education apps like Brilliant, Khan Academy, Quizlet, and Duolingo, as well as the aforementioned Finch app.

Resources

The Untitled UI kit was utilized early in development to accelerate from the low to mid-fidelity prototype, however almost all component referenced would, come the final iteration, be replace by custom elements. Iconography comes credit of Phosphor, and Quicksand is used for the typeface. Quicksand's x-height gives it a more childish, playful feel, and both text and icons share a common thread of balanced, rounded lines.

Branding

The Terragotchi pet was a custom made vector graphic sourced from a hand drawn sketch. The Terragotchi typemark is also a vector graphic, sourced from my handwriting.

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Usability Testing

Usability testing was conducted at both mid and high-fidelities. Each round had three participants , and testing was conducted both in-person and via video calls. The primary goal being to assess the ease and effectiveness of the following tasks:

1. Onboarding and orientation
2. Adding an action
3. Finding related actions
4. Completing an adaptive thinking exercise
5. Logging an action
6. Viewing personal progress

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Usability Insights

Adaptive thinking, addressing anxiety & self-efficacy

The best-received feature of the prototype were the Mindset activities. During usability studies, I asked participants to read this article, then complete an adaptive thinking exercise.

Afterwards, participants expressed that they felt more grounded, and appreciated how the suggested actions at the end of the exercise provided an answer to the question of what to do next.

"The article is just telling you everything, and the only thing you can do is absorb... [in the app] there isn't a way that you can lose, you can only progress."

"It's nice to take a second and ask “now what?”... it's a question that never gets asked."

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Personal benefit

The impact of each action within Terragotchi is broken down by environmental, personal, and community benefits. Participants responded best to the inclusion of personal benefits, and the bite-sized information.

"I'd be most interested to see how does this action benefit me... followed by environmental benefits.”

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Interconnected impact

Participants also liked seeing the impact across small, medium, and large-scales, which demonstrated how actions they may not have considered sustainable, could be good for themselves, their community, and the planet.

"You don't think about all of the ways that these things interact with each other... I could easily see one of these bullets be something that I hadn't thought of as a benefit."

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Action completion, feedback

Saved actions were initially a permanent list on the home screen, but this diminished the sense of accomplishment when users completed a behavior, as they expected behavior like that of conventional to-do apps.

"So every time I do one of these, I tap it and then it will add XP, correct? I think it'd be helpful if these disappeared... it just doesn't feel like there's an end"

In the second iteration, logged actions collapsed away, but the use of a checkmark was often confused as an indicator the action was already completed.

" I guess are... Is this indicating that I've already done these or that I need to do them?"

In the end, the checkmark was replaced with a plus icon, which is ironically what I had sketched in the beginning. Instead, the checkmark is now used to create a positive micro-interaction for the button.

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Finding actions, mental models

I designed actions such that related behaviors are listed within. My intent was to support a wiki-style action library, where users were encouraged to fall down rabbit holes to explore actions that built upon those there already performed, or were interested in.

However, when tasked with finding related actions to a specified one from the home screen, users more frequently went to Library, suggesting they associated that task with the area it pertained to.

A "Suggested" tab was added to the Action Library so to encourage building upon existing action at the place users instinctively went, but users overlooked this this area entirely in testing.

The second iteration also revealed that the high-level category navigation within the Action library increased decision fatigue when users sought an action that belong to multiple categories. Categories are implemented in the app as mutually inclusive tags, yet their representation within the Library appeared as mutually exclusive categories.

Ultimately, I recognized I was both failing to provide users enough agency to search and filter actions, and that a more fluid information architecture was necessary for the Library.

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High-fidelity prototype

To see the final prototype as a video walkthrough, click the thumbnail below:

Conclusion

Honorable mentions

Social engagement, community

The most compelling feature area not ultimately developed was that of a social element. Community and social engagement reliably came up in research as a way to support behavior — whether it be for accountability, competition, shared experience, fun, or a sense of connection. However, the core of any solutions for supporting one's pursuit of a more sustainable lifestyle needed to have foundations that effectively addressed the user specifically. I viewed socialization as an added layer on top of the core functionality, which is ultimately why it was not pursued.

Gamification

From my competitive analysis, it was clear that, particularly for younger audiences, gamification had the potential to be a significant influence on motivation, participation, and engagement. This gamification would also have furthered my goal of incorporating joy and positivity. There were countless ways gamification could have been added (from micro-interactions to in-app collectibles) but ultimately I chose to focus on the functional core of the app first.

Communication

The feature idea which was perhaps hardest to cut was the idea for Mad-Lib style conversations starters that were intended to encourage dialogue about climate change — particularly across generations, as research repeatedly pointed to the feelings of disconnect between young generations at their elders. Providing guidance while still encouraging active engagement in communication to bridge gaps and spread the word about sustainability was something that I was lamented to exclude, but as with the previous notes, Terragotchi needed to start with the user.  

This framework has parallels with socratic questioning, and is a strategy used in cognitive behavioral therapy.

Content

From the climate change communication expert, I recognized the value in effective messaging. For prototype to do its job, it would need to provide the scaffolding to convey the right information in the right ways, but for the ultimate goal of the app to be accomplished, the information itself would also need to be well designed.

Reflections & lessons

• You teach what you most need to learn
• Systems facilitate behavior
• Limit the number of works-in-progress
• Awareness precedes understanding, and understanding precedes action
• The only way out is through
• Don't race to a solution
• Stand on the shoulders of giants

Acknowledgements

I wanted to extend my gratitude to my professors & advisors:

• Arkadiy
• Christina
• Logan
• Meg

My subject matter experts:

• Karl
• Sam

The discovery interview and usability study participants who made this project possible,

and my classmates and peers of the Spring 2025 MICA MPS UX Design program.

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