Team members: Sami Cohanim, Rosanna Lederhausen
Timeframe: 4 weeks
My role: researcher, ideator, designer, artist, voice control design
by the drop is an app that incentivizes water saving behaviors. We envision this as a fun, positive space to engage your daily behaviors and your community to drive change. During our research, we realized that not everyone has access to their own water usage data. Keeping that in mind, we wanted the app to be applicable to all who want to practice saving water.
This is a video recording of the app walk-through. For clickable walk-through, scroll to the bottom of the page!
by the drop app walk-through: by using smart home devices that track water usage and data, we are able to collect valuable information about household water usage in order to push for change. See how your community is doing by looking at the community garden, which shows rankings, drops collected, and community trees. Users can also invite family, friends, or partners to plant a tree together, encouraging each other to be more conscious about their water usage. Collecting more water allows the user to take better care of their plants, thus driving change in user habits as they grow to care for their plants and want them to stay alive.
Voice control design with Voiceflow, click to enlarge the image
Adjust temperature with voice control
by the drop is also in control of your smart water devices. It is able to create settings through voice control and interact with your iPhone and apple watch to seamlessly integrate to your needs. In the bathroom, one must only tell Siri or Alexa to set a timer for the shower or to set the temperature one degree lower than usual. The Apple watch, bathroom panel and mobile app are also integrated with settings features in order to customize water preferences on the fly and to fit your personal daily needs. Additionally, users can set weekly water usage goals and track their progress as well as use saved money from their water bill towards a group fund. As water is essential to a clean, healthy life, our intention for this user base is to enjoy the game of becoming more aware of water usage and habit change rather than shaming them into change.
Sustainability Design Statement
by the drop promotes behavior change through incentivizing the use of less water (and lower water temperature) through data collected from smart water appliances. Using this data, we created a game with the metaphor of using the “saved” water to care for plants. 5 gallons of water saved in real life is equivalent to 1 droplet of water in the app.
Users can then use the saved droplets of water to water their digital plants and contribute to the community garden. To continue engaging user interests, we’ve partnered up with One Tree Planted, a tree-planting organization doing reforestation work all over the globe, to plant a tree for every 500 droplets (equivalent to 2500 gallons) of water saved, either individually or collectively. Some users may already have interest in minimizing their water consumption but lack the tools to help them track their usage. This is where by the drop comes in handy. Not only would users have the right tools to help them save water, but through the gamification of using the water saved to care for plants, join teams to plant trees, and eventually save money through their water bill (depending on their location), users will find the ability to save water a fun and exciting thing. We hope that by visualizing the saved water in this way, users will be able to see how their actions are directly tied to the water used in their home and will help promote better lifestyle habits.
Some other digital assets:
animation of water flow
Using Figma to animate water flowing effect so that the user can immediately visualize how much of their "daily target" has been used.
watercolor swatches used to create the logo, animation, and bathroom fixture icons were drawn by me, as well as developing the color palette for the app.
