Articulate Storyline · Interactive

Carbon Budget

An interactive carbon footprint calculator built in Articulate Storyline, designed so learners discover the shape of their own footprint by changing it themselves.

The brief

Most carbon-footprint training tells people facts, hoping the numbers stick. This piece was built as a personal Storyline exercise to try the opposite: give the learner a working calculator, let them manipulate the categories that make up their own footprint, and let the insight come from the pattern they see, not from a bullet point.

My role

I designed and built this piece end to end in Articulate Storyline, with custom variables and live calculation logic layered on top of the standard interaction library. It sits alongside the coded work in my portfolio as a demonstration of how the same design thinking translates into an authoring-tool environment.

How I approached it

The piece runs in three steps: set your own habits, see what they add up to, then test an assumption. Each is shown below as it appears in the finished calculator, from one run through with typical UK habits. Try the Carbon Budget calculator to see it working.

Making the numbers personal

The calculator slide, with sliders for heating and hot water, driving, flights, food and purchases. Each shows its tonnes of carbon, and the total of 9.7 tonnes is shown against a budget of 2.5 tonnes, at 386 percent.
Five everyday areas, with the total updating against the budget as each one moves.

Learners set their own habits across five everyday areas: heating and hot water, driving, flights, food and purchases. As they adjust one, the total updates immediately against a budget of 2.5 tonnes a year, so cause and effect are visible in the same glance. Nudging the thermostat or dropping a flight shows its real weight straight away, in the learner's own numbers. Driving and flight figures use the UK government's published conversion factors, the other areas are modelled on typical UK household patterns, and the sources are shown on the slide itself.

One thing worth changing

The result slide. It shows 9.7 tonnes, 7.2 tonnes over budget, and names spending as the biggest category, with the suggestion that buying less and buying to last cuts it more than almost anything else.
The result names the learner's biggest category and one practical change for it.

The calculator deliberately has no right or wrong answer, because the aim is insight rather than testing. Instead of ending on a total and a telling off, the result picks out the learner's biggest category and offers one practical change for it. A single clear next step is far more likely to be acted on than a list of everything that could be better.

Testing an assumption

A fact check question asking which single choice usually has the biggest carbon impact for most UK households, with four options: one long-haul flight, driving, switching off lights, and diet.
A closing fact check on which everyday choice matters most.

A short fact check closes the piece. Coming straight after the calculator, it lets learners test what they have just discovered against the assumptions they arrived with.

Status is never carried by colour alone: the total is always given as a figure and as a percentage of the budget as well (WCAG 2.2, criterion 1.4.1), and the sliders can be operated by keyboard as well as by mouse.

Outcome

Carbon Budget is a personal build, not a client commission, so the outcome is the artefact itself and the demonstration that an insight-led calculator is achievable inside Storyline without dropping to bespoke code. It has become the piece I point to when someone asks whether authoring-tool work can carry the same design intent as the coded modules I usually build.

What I would do differently

A future version would compare the learner's biggest-lever result against a small anonymised cohort, so the insight lands in a social context rather than in isolation. Storyline can hold that in a variable and pass it to a lightweight backend, which is the next thing I would build.