At the time of the project, Bulb were the UK’s largest green energy company. They had disrupted the energy market and created a utility brand that people actually wanted to engage with. They were looking to expand their services beyond energy supply, and start thinking about ways to support people becoming greener in all aspects of life.
Bulb briefed ustwo to prototype, validate and build an alpha for a carbon calculator that would measure and offset the carbon impact of people’s lifestyle.
They gave us 6 weeks to do this.
We collaborated with Bulb’s in house research team to do a mix of qualitative and quantitative research around Bulb’s best first audience. We looked at their attitudes to carbon offsets, what efforts they were already making to reduce their impact and the level of accuracy they would need from a tool like this.
We tested three different directions with this audience, each of which explored a different angle for getting people not just to start offsetting but change aspects of their lifestyle that was creating the most emissions.
We designed a built a landing page which explained the calculator would be coming soon, and invited people to take part in testing it. People were directed from social media adverts and emails to a sign up form on the landing page.
Thanks to this we saw over 450 people sign up to test the calculator in the first week.
After launching a basic calculator alpha, we saw roughly 650 calculations completed during the testing phase, and 267 feedback responses.
This formed the basis for a calculator design that was simple, clear, and fun to use. We left Bulb with a vision prototype, which they turned into live designs in the following months.
The carbon calculator remained live for the remainder of Bulb’s time in operation, with an estimated 62,572 tonnes of offsets purchased in total. Sadly, the calculator has stopped accepting new customers since December 2022, after Bulb was acquired by Octopus.
