Encouraging and reporting on sustainable venue choices
I redesigned the sustainability features of HeadBox’s B2B meeting and events platform to be more user-friendly and cost-effective and created a new sustainability reporting dashboard.
Key Challenge: Encouraging bookers to make the sustainable choice at a glance by presenting emissions data in an easily understandable way
Key Impact: The new sustainability features increased the availability of emissions data from 20% to over 70% of venues while removing the need for manual data entry by users.
Part 1 - Status Quo
Platform before new features
HeadBox's service-led meetings and events platform
The product connects corporate customers with venues and HeadBox’s meeting and events team (M&E team): Corporate bookers use it to enquire about an event. The M&E team gather proposals for these enquiries from venues on the platform. The proposals are sent to the booker for decision-making and booking.
Issues with the previous sustainability features of the meeting and events platform
To accommodate corporate customers, meeting and event platforms and programs need to demonstrate sustainability initiatives.
An ambitious previous solution to promote sustainable event choices and report on event emissions had several issues, as seen on the right. This led to low usage of these sustainability features and missed reporting targets.
Pain points of previous solution
Third-party service providing energy data was expensive and provided little coverage (<20%)
Reporting on food/waste/travel emissions relied on time-poor clients entering data not readily available to them. Uptake on entering travel data was only <2%.
Supposedly accurate reporting on food/waste emissions relied heavily on rough data estimations.
Travel/waste/food emissions were not very relevant for decision-making as they were too similar for the venues.
Key requirements for new solution
New cost-effective data sources with higher coverage
No reliance on bookers entering data
Don’t represent estimations as accurate data
Present the booker with actionable data at the decision stage to help them make an informed choice
Need for new low-effort sustainability features
I joined this project with the goal of providing a new solution to allow bookers to make sustainable venue choices. It had to use a more cost-effective data source, require less of the bookers’ time and show realistic data that bookers could meaningfully compare at the point of decision making.
Redesigning the Sustainability Features
Tech spike uncovers new free data source for energy emissions
An initial tech spike identified government-provided EPC certificates as an ideal new data source for the project. A free API has coverage for most buildings in the UK and provides data that is highly comparable as it follows the same standard.
Calculating accurate and easy-to-compare emissions data for venue choices
A calculation using the EPC data, the duration of a booking and the size of a space provided the energy-use emissions for each proposed venue of a booking. This emissions number allows bookers to directly take sustainability into account during their decision-making without the need for them to input any additional data.
Seamless integration of new sustainability feature into existing experiences
The focus of my design was to seamlessly integrate the new information into all existing parts of the booker experience, especially the overview and the proposal pages.
The new information should be easy to understand and help the booker make a choice while taking into account the two most important factors for them: sustainability and cost.
Platform with new features
Collaborating with development and product support to deliver the new sustainability features
After internal stakeholders’ approval of my designs, I wrote up tickets for development, splitting the tickets based on the different repositories of the product. I handed over the designs and tickets to the dev team in a meeting to clarify any remaining questions.
After development, I coordinated feature testing with product support and did the final acceptance testing before coordinating and communicating the release with users and internal stakeholders.
New Sustainability Feature Designs
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Overview page - Highlight and sorting options
To support the booker with their decision-making, I highlighted the most sustainable option on the overview page and added new sorting options for cost and emissions, with emissions being the default.
Part 2 - Designing a new Sustainability Dashboard
Kickoff for a new sustainability dashboard in the existing B2B reporting tool “Insights”
While the newly released features started gathering data, the next step was to think about how we could report our corporate bookers’ sustainable venue choices to their stakeholders. The goal was to design a new sustainability dashboard for the meeting and event platform's existing reporting tool called “Insights”.
Facilitating a product advisory board on sustainability with business clients
To receive insightful information on the sustainability journey of our business clients and get buy-in from these external stakeholders, I held a product advisory board on the topic of sustainability. 4 senior stakeholders from our clients and 3 internal stakeholders attended.
Starting with an interesting round table on sustainability challenges and goals, we continued with two product demos and ended with a brainstorming on sustainability reporting, producing a lot of ideas and a shared understanding.
Incorporating advisory board ideas into the new sustainability dashboard concept
I categorised these ideas into those useful for the current challenge of reporting on the new sustainability data in Insights and those valuable for future sustainability initiatives at HeadBox.
Based on these ideas, I focused on the main questions the dashboard should answer and how the available data could be presented to answer them. After several sketches, I created and refined designs over a few days, incorporating feedback from colleagues close to the project along the way.
Creating an accessible dashboard while remaining in scope
Dashboards are a good example of how designs can easily be made accessible. After initial UI designs, I checked contrast ratios and looked at the designs using a no colour filter. Based on this, I adjusted charts and graphs to ensure that information is not only differentiated by colour but also by pattern to ensure they can also be understood by users with visual impairments. Unfortunately, due to the small scope of the project, it was not possible to consider other crucial accessibility concerns like screen reader compatibility for this initial version.
New Sustainability Dashboard Designs
Design of the new sustainability dashboard
The result is an insightful dashboard providing data on the sustainability of our corporate clients’ event program.
The first section provides transparency about the availability of sustainability data.
The next section shows insights into the energy-use emissions and how sustainable bookers choices were, including a benchmarking with other clients to motivate companies to do better.
Another section shows the relationship between the two factors that our stakeholders care most about: cost and sustainability. The hope is this will show that the most sustainable option doesn’t have to be the most expensive one.
The last section highlights sustainability champions amongst the bookers, booked venues and bookings, giving clients the opportunity to promote sustainable behaviour and highlight role models.
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Challenges & Learnings
Dealing with data gaps from third-party sources
With both the old and new solution we couldn’t expect to receive full data coverage from our external sources. Therefore, it was necessary to account for these cases in the design and provide easy-to-understand explanations to the user so that venue data not provided by the data sources would not reflect badly on the feature.
Expectations of big companies around sustainability reporting of small suppliers
The product advisory board highlighted the ambitious expectations of big companies when it comes to sustainability reporting. As one of their many suppliers, it is crucial to understand what we can and can’t offer to help them on their journey while remaining transparent and truthful.
Designing transparent and trustworthy sustainability reporting
A lot of sustainability initiatives suffer from greenwashing or using estimated data to provide the illusion of accurate reporting. Showing what you do and don’t know is key to avoiding this. To ensure our reporting is transparent and trustworthy, I designed the dashboard so that it highlights what data we can provide, which data we can’t and why right at the top.
Datum März 2025 - Juni 2025
Arbeit des Product & Tech Teams mit Ellen Schmucker als Product Designerin und Managerin
Endstanden bei HeadBox
Tools Figma, Figjam, Jira
Methoden Pain Point Analyse, Requirement Management, UX Konzept, UI Design, Ticketing, manuelles Software Testing, Release Management, Workshop Organisation, Wireframing, Dashboard Design, barrierefreies UI Design