MyWater

Mobile application designed to help optimize water intake

Time Frame

2016 - 2017

Scope

Product Design, Visual Design, User Research

Deliverables

UX Design (mobile)

Studies for the past few decades have highlighted how important adequate water intake is and how detrimental it is to both physical and mental performance when you're even slightly dehydrated.

These studies also show that people are inadequately hydrated, even if they live a relatively sedentary lifestyle – they don’t drink enough water overall and overestimate the amount that they actually are consuming. This issue becomes even more pronounced in people who regularly exercise or engage in activities where they sweat.

MyWater was my attempt at fixing this issue. Users would first fill out a survey to help hone in on exactly how much water they would need per day. Then the app would provide common increments (+1 cup, +1/2 cups, etc) to quickly and easily log their intake throughout the day.

The gamification aspect (daily “trophies” for reaching the intake goal, being able to visualize a streak of days where the user successfully hit their goal, etc) would aid in habit formation and solidifying healthier behavior as normal parts of their life.

Project Goals

1 Increasing water consumption

Most people aren't adequately hydrated. Fine-tuning your hydration needs based upon your level of activity and location is extremely important.

Strategy

Having defaults that map to a user’s age, gender, weight, height, etc would encourage good habits from the start.

By allowing customization, users with more unique requirements can adjust their intake goals to exactly what they need.

2 Daily hydration goal

Reaching the water consumption goal for the day is the most important thing for the user.

Research shows that making people more aware of the trends in their behavior can be a catalyst that induces positive behavior change.

Strategy

Getting feedback on whether or not you’ve had enough water during the day will start to update your internal mechanisms as far as it comes to drinking enough water.

This forced mindfulness will help a person calibrate their daily intake to be healthier.

3 Build a habit

Being able to see that you've reached your intake goal for the past 4 days in a row will have an effect on whether or not you reach your goal going forward.

Strategy

Research shows that taking an action everyday for about 2 months (on average) will build a habit.

By getting people to stay on a streak, we can try to create a water drinking habit.

Research

When first thinking about this problem, I created personas to try to get a better understanding of who would be using the app, what their lifestyle was like now, and what their potential motivations would be in using a tracker like this.

I also began laying out what the different “pieces” of this app would be at a high level, focusing mostly on what functionality the user would need, but not getting into any actual interface design just yet.