Isaiah Udoh on Designing Sustainability Technology That People Actually Use

Isaiah Udoh is a UI/UX and Product Designer whose work sits at a rare intersection, making sustainability technology genuinely usable by everyday people. Over the past two years, he has designed end-to-end digital products deployed across football stadiums, music festivals, retail environments, and sustainable fairs in Portugal, collectively reaching hundreds of thousands of users. His work has contributed to award wins, £168,000 in secured investment, and the startup's selection as one of just 11 startups globally accepted into Mastercard's Start Path Emerging Fintech programme. We sat down with Isaiah to go deeper on what it really means to design for impact and what the industry still gets wrong.

Your work is often described in terms of products that were launched and scaled. But let's start with the harder question: what does it take to design something people actually use, rather than just something that looks good?

That's the tension I've lived with throughout my career. Design that just looks good is easy to produce. Design that actually works for someone standing at a bar in a football stadium, scanning a QR code for the first time, with thousands of people around them, that's a completely different problem.

The fundamental shift for me was learning to design for the person who has never seen the product before and will never read a manual. Every interaction has to be self-evident. Every screen has to earn its place. If someone hesitates for even a second, you've already lost them, and in a live event environment, that hesitation means they'll just put their phone away.

When I took on the redesign of the consumer engagement platform, the platform had real problems like poor visual hierarchy, no consistent branding, and features buried in places users couldn't find. It didn't feel credible. And that lack of credibility was the core issue. If a product doesn't feel trustworthy at first glance, the user won't engage with it regardless of what it does. So before I touched a single pixel, I asked, 'What would make this feel real and trusted?' That question drove everything: the layout decisions, the colour system, the typography, and the flow.

You redesigned not just one product but an entire platform ecosystem, a consumer engagement platform, an enterprise sustainability dashboard, a sustainability app for a Portuguese brand and a corporate website. Each of those is a fundamentally different design challenge. How do you shift between them?

The honest answer is that I don't think of them as separate problems; I think of them as different expressions of the same question: who is this for, and what do they need to feel confident right now?

The consumer engagement platform is exactly that, consumer-facing. The user might be at a festival, slightly distracted, and just handed a reusable cup. They need to scan a QR code and immediately understand what's happening, what they've earned, and what their impact is. The design has to be almost instinctive.

The sustainable dashboard is the complete opposite. It's used by venue managers and operations teams at organisations like Derby County FC, Notts County FC, and ASM Global. They need to track inventory across multiple locations, monitor sustainability metrics in real time, and make decisions under pressure during live events. When I joined that project, it was essentially a backend developer built by engineers for engineers. There was no UX thinking applied at all. My job was to translate a technically powerful tool into something a first-time user could navigate without any training.

What I introduced there was a dual dashboard structure that separates environmental impact data from operational performance metrics. It sounds simple, but that separation was significant; it meant users could go directly to the information relevant to their role, rather than being overwhelmed by everything at once. I also built real-time location monitoring that pulls data across multiple venues into a single view and designed it to be fully mobile-responsive, because most of the people running these events are on the move.

The EcoX app was different again, a full end-to-end product built for a Portuguese sustainability brand. Login flows, purchase history, refill tracking, reward claiming, oil deposit maps, OTP verification screens. I designed every screen in that app. And for that one, working across languages and cultures remotely added another layer of complexity. The brand identity had to be respected, but the UX had to be universal.

And then the website – that's a communication design problem as much as a UX problem. The challenge with the company's website was that it needed to speak clearly to three completely different audiences simultaneously: investors evaluating traction, enterprise clients assessing whether the product fits their environment, and general consumers trying to understand what the technology actually does. Most B2B sustainability sites fail because they pick one audience and ignore the others. I designed around adaptive messaging and industry-specific content that speaks directly to each sector while keeping the overall brand coherent and credible.

The Sustainable Platform, specifically, you described it as going from a developer tool to something accessible by all. That's a significant transformation. What was the most difficult design decision you made during that process?

The hardest decision was choosing what to remove.

When you're dealing with a data-heavy platform, there's enormous pressure to show everything, every metric, every filter, every configuration option. The engineering team had built a lot of capability into that system, and there was a natural instinct to surface all of it.

But I had to push back on that. The people using this platform during a live event at a stadium don't need 40 data points on one screen. They need to know how many cups have come back, from which locations, and what the environmental impact is so far. Everything else can wait.

So I made the decision to design a simplified interface with progressive disclosure; the core information is immediately visible, and the deeper data is accessible but not intrusive. Clear visuals, simplified actions, and confirmation popups to prevent errors. The principle I kept returning to was 'Could someone pick this up for the first time during a busy event and use it without anyone explaining it to them?'

That constraint made every decision cleaner. And ultimately, it's what made the platform work at the scale it now operates – hundreds of thousands of transactions tracked monthly, across organisations like Derby County FC, Notts County FC, Derby LIVE, and EcoX in Portugal.

Let's talk about recognition. Your work contributed to the startup being selected for Mastercard's Start Path programme, one of 11 startups chosen globally from hundreds of applicants. What does that kind of validation mean to you professionally?

It means the work holds up under scrutiny from people who evaluate technology at the highest level.

Mastercard's Start Path programme has supported over 500 startups across 60 countries since 2014. They're not looking for companies that look good; they're looking for companies that are genuinely innovative and have the market credibility to back it up. The fact that the startup was selected from hundreds of global applicants and that my designs, the pitch deck, the product interfaces, the website, and the case studies were central to that application tells me the design work was communicating something real.

The same applies to the EcoX SME EnterPRIZE win in 2025. The CEO of EcoX said directly that the app contributed to why they won. Millions of litres of water saved, thousands of reuse actions recorded, all tracked through an app I designed end-to-end. Awards like that are measured on actual environmental impact, not just aesthetics. That distinction matters to me.

The Sustainability Awards 2024 finalist position, the National Sustainable Awards shortlist, and the SME Midlands Enterprise Award win for the company – each of these was assessed by independent judges with deep sector expertise. Collectively, they represent external validation that spans the UK and Europe.

You've also received recognition at a governmental level, a parliamentary visit from MP Baggy Shanker. That's unusual for a designer. How did that come about and what did it signal to you?

It came about because the technology had a story worth telling at that level. The visit was about understanding how circular economy technology could be applied to reduce single-use plastic waste and encourage sustainable behaviour across communities. The platforms I'd designed, particularly the consumer engagement platform, were being used as concrete examples of that.

What it signalled to me was that design, when it's done well, creates policy-level impact. It's not just about whether the button is in the right place. When you design something that genuinely changes how people interact with sustainability, that makes it frictionless to return a cup, to track your environmental impact, or to choose the sustainable option, you're contributing to a much larger conversation about behaviour change at scale.

I don't think designers talk about that enough. We talk about user flows and conversion rates. But the real measure of great design in this space is whether it shifts behaviour in ways that matter beyond the screen.

What do most designers get wrong about designing for sustainability technology specifically?

They design for awareness when they should be designing for action.

Most sustainability apps and platforms are excellent at telling you what the problem is. They show you graphs of carbon emissions; they display percentages; they give you data. But data alone doesn't change behaviour. What changes behaviour is reducing friction at the moment of decision.

When I designed the EcoX app, the goal wasn't to educate users about why recycling used cooking oil matters; they already knew. The goal was to make the process of returning oil, tracking refills, and claiming rewards so seamless that the sustainable choice became the easiest choice. The reward mechanism, the map to deposit locations, and the instant feedback on environmental impact – all of that was designed to close the gap between intention and action.

The same principle applied to the consumer engagement platform. People at a music festival don't need a lecture on plastic waste. They need to scan a cup, see that they've saved 0.3kg of plastic, feel good about it, and move on. Ten seconds. That's your window to create a meaningful interaction.

Simplicity is not a stylistic preference in this context; it's an ethical requirement. If your sustainability product is hard to use, it won't change anything.

Where do you see the future of design in the sustainability and circular economy space?

I think the biggest shift coming is around real-time environmental accountability. Right now, most organisations report on sustainability quarterly or annually. The data exists in reports that very few people read.

What I've seen through the sustainable platform work is that when you give organisations a real-time view of their environmental impact, not in a PDF six months from now but on a dashboard during a live event, it changes how decisions get made. Venue managers start to care about cup return rates because they can see the number changing in front of them. That immediacy creates a different relationship with the data.

As more organisations commit to sustainability targets, there's going to be a significant demand for design that makes this kind of live accountability accessible to non-technical users across industries. The opportunity for designers who understand both the UX complexity and the environmental context is enormous. And I think the UK is genuinely well positioned to lead that, given the density of sustainability-focused startups and the regulatory environment pushing organisations toward greater transparency.

That's the space I want to keep working in, designing products that don't just measure impact but actively enable it.