UX design and research
Carbon Neutral Web & Portal
Businesses need a simple and trustworthy way to offset their carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits. However, the carbon market is complex, with unfamiliar terminology, varying project types, certification standards, pricing, and levels of risk.
The challenge was to design a digital portal that helps businesses understand their offsetting needs, discover and compare credible carbon credit projects, make informed purchases, and manage their ongoing offsetting activity without requiring them to become carbon market experts.
The resulting UX direction was centred around making a complex market feel simple without making it feel simplistic.
The research, expert interviews and iterative design process helped translate the language and mechanics of carbon trading into an experience that businesses could understand and trust.
The final product concept positioned the portal as a bridge between carbon-market expertise and everyday business decision-making — giving users enough information to make responsible purchasing decisions while removing unnecessary complexity from the process.
I was the Lead UX Designer throughout the project. Working closely with Business owners, product owner and carbon specialists. I helped with planning and requirements gathering, strategic direction, wireframing, user testing interviews, UI design and component development.
Web & Portal responsive design
The project began with a discovery phase focused on understanding both the carbon market and the people who interact with it.
This included:
* Reviewing the voluntary carbon market and how carbon credits are generated, verified, purchased and retired.
* Researching carbon accounting, emissions scopes and the relationship between measuring emissions and offsetting them.
* Conducting a competitive analysis of existing carbon marketplaces, carbon management platforms and trading products.
* Reviewing how different platforms communicate project quality, impact, pricing, certification and risk.
* Speaking with carbon traders and market experts to understand how transactions actually happen behind the scenes.
* Interviewing potential business users to understand their level of knowledge, motivations and concerns around purchasing offsets.
The research highlighted a significant UX opportunity: businesses shouldn't need to become carbon market experts in order to confidently make a purchase.
Research revealed that the portal needed to support several different stakeholders, including sustainability managers, business owners, procurement teams and finance stakeholders.
Their goals could be quite different. A sustainability manager may want to understand the environmental impact and integrity of a project, while procurement may be more concerned with pricing, contracts and suppliers.
This led to a core UX principle:
Make the experience simple for the buyer, without hiding the complexity that experts need to evaluate.
Rather than removing detailed information, the experience would progressively disclose it, presenting the most important information first, with deeper project, methodology and verification details available when required.
The information architecture was designed around the decisions a business needs to make rather than around the terminology used by the carbon industry..
Instead of requiring users to understand technical carbon-market classifications upfront, the platform could allow them to start with business objectives such as:.
* How much carbon do we need to offset?.
* What type of projects align with our values?.
* Where should the projects be located?.
* What level of verification do we require?.
* What is our budget?.
* What impact do we want to support?.
These requirements then become filters and recommendations, helping users progressively narrow the market down to relevant projects.
The core marketplace experience was designed to make carbon credits feel understandable and comparable.
Project cards and detail pages surfaced the information needed to make an informed decision, including:
* Project type
* Location
* Number of credits available
* Price per tonne
* Certification / standard
* Vintage
* Estimated climate impact
* Additional environmental or social benefits
* Verification information
* Project risks and considerations
The objective was to create an experience that felt closer to a modern B2B purchasing platform than a traditional trading terminal.
Web & Portal responsive design
