Full-stack · UX
Terra CO₂ - Designing and Building a Carbon Calculator
End-to-end ownership from research through to deployed product. Terra is a carbon footprint calculator built on a user research foundation, designed in Figma and built in React with a PHP and SQL backend.
Role
UX Designer · Full-Stack Developer
timeline
3 Months
team
Solo
industry
Sustainability / EdTech
The PRoblem
Carbon calculators were either too complex or too vague to be useful.
Existing carbon footprint tools fell into two failure modes, overwhelming users with technical data they couldn't interpret, or oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness. Neither approach gave users the actionable, personalised insight they needed to understand their actual environmental impact. The goal was to find the space between the two: approachable enough for any user, specific enough to be genuinely informative.
The approach
Research-led from the first line of code.
I began with user research into how people think and talk about carbon footprint, their existing mental models, their points of confusion, and what kind of output would feel meaningful to them. This informed the information architecture and interaction design before a single line of code was written. I designed the full interface in Figma, then built the application in React with a PHP backend and SQL database. Every design decision, from the question structure to the results display, was grounded in what the research had surfaced about user comprehension and motivation.
The outcome
A live product. Design and code, start to finish.
Terra was deployed as a fully functional application, research-informed, accessibly coded, and built entirely by one person across design and engineering. The project demonstrates the full-stack design-to-code capability that most accessibility and UX specialists cannot offer: the ability to design something well and then build it properly, understanding both the human and the technical dimensions of the problem.
The tools
This are some of the tools I used in this project.
Figma
html
css
js
php
sql
Notion
Miro
slack
What impressed me most was that Chiara didn't treat design and development as separate phases. The code was as thoughtful as the interface, and the interface was as solid as the code.