Designing the End-of-Use Consumer Experience in a Circular Economy for the Apple iPhone

Abstract

The aim of this project was to design an end-of-use experience in a circular economy for the Apple iPhone. The main challenge was to find out what the obstacles were at the end-of-use. During this research it became clear that many consumers don’t do anything with their old phone when they buy a new one. These old iPhones are left forgotten in drawers. For a circular economy to work, consumers need to bring back their old phones to the store. In this way, valuable material won’t go to waste. To understand the user’s perspective, in dept interviews have been performed. It showed from these interviews that many users keep an old phone as a spare phone for when their current phone dies. But that after some time, these spare phones get “replaced” by other old phones. In this way the drawer with old phones is being created. After a while, these phones are left forgotten. The users often don’t know what data is on these phones. They don’t know what to do with it but can’t take distance from it. After the consumer research, the design goal of this research was created: “Users should be able to comfortably and efficiently back-up their data and then delete their personal information, while feeling reassured and confident. The interaction should become a trustworthy and standard operation”. The focus of the project was backing-up data from the iPhone, so that the users could feel reassured and confident about deleting data from their old phones, because they had stored their data somewhere save. This resulted in the final design of this project: BackUps. BackUps is an app where all old iPhones a user has had, are stored. The iPhones stored in BackUps are looking the same as they were when they were in use. To have this overview of old phones, the user might become less attached to the physical device, because they now see that all data has been stored in the BackUps. The data stored is stored in the iCloud. An implementation plan is also given. When users return their phone to the store, they will get storage as an incentive. This storage can be used for the data of their old phones.