Carbon Budget
An interactive carbon footprint calculator built in Articulate Storyline, designed to let learners discover the shape of their own footprint by manipulating it rather than being told about it.
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 calculator covers six live-calculated categories: transport, home energy, diet, goods, services, and travel. Each is calibrated against UK government emissions figures from DEFRA and DESNZ, and per-capita comparisons from Oxford's Our World in Data. As the learner adjusts one category, the total updates immediately, so cause and effect are visible in the same glance.
Because the piece is about behavioural insight, not testing, the design deliberately avoids a right or wrong answer. Instead the closing step surfaces the learner's biggest lever, the single category where a change on their part would shift their total the most. That is the thing they take away.
Accessibility was designed in from the first slide. Status information is never carried by colour alone; every colour cue has a written label alongside it, meeting WCAG 2.2 criterion 1.4.1. Focus order, keyboard operation, and text alternatives were built into the Storyline variables rather than added afterwards.
Try the Carbon Budget calculator to see it working.
Outcome
Carbon Budget is a personal build rather than a client commission, so the outcome is the artefact itself and the demonstration that an accessible, 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.