Works

Scope:

UX Strategy & Service Mapping

Year:

2026

OVERVIEW

Running a short series of workshops and using quick AI drafts to help a tiny Japanese startup make their home-composting service clearer and more attractive to customers.

The Mission: Work directly with a small 2-3 person team in Tokyo, Japan to help them grow their eco-friendly composting service.

The Product: A special household compost box that seals with a zipper. Users fill it, mail the soil back to Ecotas, and Ecotas distributes it to regional farms to grow food.

The Goal: Figure out how to make the service appealing and scale their early customer base up from just ~10 active users.

PROBLEMS

Low Sales: The service idea was interesting, but they were barely selling any boxes.

Cultural Barrier: Home composting is very unusual in Japanese residential areas, meaning people had natural hesitation around things like smells and hygiene.

Lack of Education: There was no clear explanation or guide showing users why they should participate or how composting actually helps the environment.

Transactional Focus: The early business model focused mostly on the logistics of selling the physical box, rather than designing a good long-term experience for the person using it.

We mapped out key observations about Ecotas' current business structure to highlight potential issues with their marketing and product strategy

MY ROLE

I co-created two strategy workshops directly with my team and the company's founder, Nakano-san. Since home composting is much more common and popular in European households, my main focus was bringing in that cultural context to help figure out how we could make the habit feel more normal and less messy for users in Japan. I also worked on taking our workshop ideas and using generative AI tools like Figma Make to quickly draft rough app layouts so the client had a clear, tangible direction to look at right away.

DIRECTION

We focused on changing how Ecotas connects with its customers. We wanted to shift them away from just selling a physical box to creating a community lifestyle loop. This could happen either through an app, a website, or real-life events.

SOLUTIONS

Prototype Hypothesis

Visualizing the strategy: Rather than presenting only text-heavy slide decks or abstract diagrams, we used Figma Make to quickly build rough interface concepts. We made sure to tell the client that this didn't have to be an app. It could be a website or another platform entirely. These quick visuals were just a tool to show what was possible and make our abstract strategy tangible.

Three Strategic Hypotheses

Built the final presentation around testing three specific ideas to see what would motivate users to stick with the service:

Contribution & Feedback: Users want to see the real-world impact of their efforts. The platform concept tracks exactly where their mailed soil goes, using clear progress logs and milestone rewards, like getting discounts on fresh produce grown using their composted soil.
Learning & Confidence: To overcome the unfamiliarity of composting, we suggested friendly step-by-step guides. These teach users how to handle the soil safely, how to grow things at home, and how their individual choices reduce waste.
Togetherness & Community: Composting can feel lonely and messy. We added concepts for community forums and local real-world events organized by Ecotas to give users a sense of shared purpose.

OUTCOMES

Pivoting the business model: Our workshops helped the team realize they needed to change their perspective. We recommended moving away from one-off hardware sales and instead focusing on a continuous membership or subscription experience.

Renewed direction: The founder left the workshops with a concrete list of ideas to explore. By seeing their limited resources mapped out against an automated community plan, the team gained back hope and momentum for their product roadmap.

LEARNINGS

Rough visuals can help clear the air: When working with tiny, non-technical teams, polished pixels don't matter. Rough, immediate drafts are the fastest way to help a founder understand structural changes and make quick project decisions.

Design for reality: A 2-3 person company cannot manage a complex, heavy internal product system. As a designer, you have to find ways to let the community handle the engagement, building the digital tool to automate the connection rather than creating more manual work for the startup.

Purpose before product: If an app or website asks users to adopt a strange, unfamiliar habit, they won't download it just for features. They need to connect with the company's long-term environmental purpose before they will bring a compost box into their kitchen. This means focusing on the "why" rather than the "what".