Clover
Making sustainable choices part of the workday.
Clover is a behavior-change system that helps employees make lower-impact choices through contextual nudges embedded into their existing workflows.
Role
Product Designer
Team
6 UX Designer
Partner
Salesforce
Timeline
10 weeks
My contribution
Research synthesis, ideation, UI design, prototyping
Sponsored by Salesforce · Designed with feedback from Salesforce product designers
Role
Product Designer
Team
6 UX Designer
Partner
Salesforce
Timeline
10 weeks
My contribution
Research synthesis, ideation, UI design, prototyping
Sponsored by Salesforce · Designed with feedback from Salesforce product designers
The problem
THE CHALLENGE
Employees cared about sustainability. The problem was acting on it.
Salesforce challenged us to explore how employees could make more sustainable choices during their workday without adding friction to already complex workflows.
Our research revealed a gap: employees broadly cared about sustainability, but the environmental cost of everyday digital actions—video calls, cloud storage and data-heavy workflows—was largely invisible.
The turning point
21 SURVEY RESPONSES · INTERVIEWS · COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
Awareness wasn't the problem. The moment of action was.
01 — Make impact tangible
Abstract energy metrics don't mean much in the middle of someone's workday.
02 — Meet people where they work
A separate sustainability tool creates another task. The intervention needed to live inside existing workflows.
03 — Encourage, don't shame
Positive reinforcement felt more appropriate than penalizing people for resource use.
These insights shifted our question from “How do we track sustainable behavior?” to “How do we make the sustainable choice easier at the moment it matters?”
The design principle
Make the better choice the easier choice.
We used the BJ Fogg Behavior Model before ideation to focus our concepts around two things we could influence: ability and prompts.
Rather than asking employees to build an entirely new sustainability habit, Clover intervenes at moments when a lower-impact choice is already easy to make.
The big design decision
FROM PRODUCT → SYSTEM
We stopped designing an app.
A standalone sustainability product would create exactly the friction we were trying to remove. Instead, we designed Clover as a set of reusable behavioral patterns that could live across employees' existing tools.
Six patterns. One principle: intervene without interrupting.
Clover in action
THE SOLUTION
From principles to everyday moments
Clover turns our six behavioral patterns into small, contextual interventions across the workday. Instead of asking employees to seek out sustainability information, it surfaces a better choice when that choice is relevant, achievable, and easy to act on.
NUDGE - Intervene when the choice can still change
ACTIVE NUDGE
Clover surfaces a lower-impact alternative at the moment of action—before resources are consumed. The nudge stays subtle, giving employees the choice to engage without interrupting their workflow
EMBED — Meet people where they already work
EMBEDDED NUDGE
Instead of becoming another tool employees have to remember, Clover integrates into existing workflows—surfacing relevant alternatives where decisions are already being made.
TRANSLATE — Make invisible impact tangible
IMPACT FRAMING
Energy consumption is difficult to act on when it's expressed only through abstract metrics.
Clover translates resource use into familiar equivalents and shows employees how their everyday decisions add up over time. Instead of asking people to interpret kilowatt-hours, the dashboard connects sustainable actions to outcomes they can understand at a glance.
REINFORCE — Encourage progress without creating guilt
REINFORCEMENT
We deliberately avoided framing sustainability through warnings, penalties, or negative scores.
Instead, Clover reinforces the actions employees do take and periodically reflects their cumulative impact back to them. The intention is to make sustainable behavior feel achievable and rewarding—not like another performance metric employees are being judged against.
Present when useful. Quiet when it's not.
THE INTERACTION
Clover needed to earn attention without competing for it.
Most of the time, the widget remains passive. When it identifies a relevant opportunity, a subtle state change signals that an alternative is available. The employee decides whether to engage, keeping control of both the workflow and the intervention.
Designing for trust
THE INTERACTION
A system that responds to employee behavior naturally raises questions about monitoring and privacy. Both participants and our Salesforce partners emphasized that Clover could only work if employees trusted how their activity was being interpreted.
That led us toward a privacy-first model: analyze only the metadata required to identify relevant moments, process activity locally where possible, and give employees control over which tools Clover can access.
The goal is to understand enough context to offer a useful nudge—without understanding the contents of someone's work.
Early usability testing
Testing the interaction, not proving the behavior
We used the BJ Fogg Behavior Model before ideation to focus our concepts around two things we could influence: ability and prompts.
Rather than asking employees to build an entirely new sustainability habit, Clover intervenes at moments when a lower-impact choice is already easy to make.
We conducted two formative usability sessions to understand whether Clover's core interaction was clear: Could employees notice a nudge without feeling interrupted? Could they understand why a recommendation appeared? And could they confidently decide what to do next?
With a small sample, our goal wasn't to validate long-term behavior change. It was to identify early usability issues and refine how Clover communicated its recommendations.
Reflection
WHAT I TOOK AWAY
Small interactions can create impact at enterprise scale
Clover changed how I think about behavior change. Sustainable action doesn't always require asking people to radically change their habits. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is a small intervention, placed at exactly the right moment in an existing workflow.
What feels like a minor decision for one employee can become significant when repeated across an organization. This project made me more conscious of the responsibility we have as designers: not just to make actions possible, but to make better choices easier to make.
Clover was created by a six-person team as a Salesforce-sponsored project, with ongoing critique and feedback from Salesforce product designers.
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