USA Waste & Recycling had a Dumpster Problem.

Their phones were constantly ringing with calls from customers who needed help picking a container.

“What size do I need to clean out my garage?”
”How much stuff is in your garage?”
”I don’t know, like a garage-sized amount?”…

Aside from wasting hundreds of man-hours on redundant conversations, there was also a risk of a misdiagnosis. Despite operators asking good questions and pointing people in a likely direction, it’s impossible to figure out over the phone exactly how much trash is in someone’s garage. They needed a tool that could help customers self-diagnose their needs, so we got to work.

During our discovery process we learned that their operators were often comparing dumpster sizes to truck beds, as in "How many truckloads of stuff do you have?”. This worked well for contractors but was incredibly unintuitive for soccer moms, millennial homeowners, and anyone else not intimately familiar with the storage capacity of a pickup bed.

We needed a more universal proxy for volume, and after workshopping a few options we settled on the simple visual of a one-cubic-yard box, placed next to an average-sized adult man. This gave us a measurement that any person could understand and had the added benefit of literally being the same measurement used for the dumpsters.

For further clarity, we placed all four dumpster sizes next to their contents with a person for scale. Aside from helping customers to see just how much material could fit in each dumpster size, seeing the contents outside the can also highlighted that you might need a larger size than you’d initially thought.

To tie everything together we captured footage of dumpsters on-location at various properties, using motion graphics to highlight typical projects that would be appropriate for each size container.

What size container do you think you need?