Droplet

a personal informatics application that measures your water footprint

• Project Type: Group [4 members]
• Duration: January 2018 — April 2018
• My Role: UX Designer, UX Researcher, Product Manager

Summary

Droplet is a mobile app that helps consumers measure their water footprint through the products that they use. Water footprint can be defined as the amount of water it takes to manufacture a product such as cheese or a juice carton. The system calculates the water footprint based on the products one buys at a supermarket and offers less water-intensive products as an alternative. It also calculates the water footprint of individual meals at restaurants based on the ingredients used.

Product Mission
Droplet seeks to raise awareness of the unforeseen costs of purchasing an item and make more thougtful purchases

Process

Our group was interested in solving a problem related to sustainability. We first went through a series of brainstorming exercises to consider various areas we could look into. We considered paper consumption, food wastage, local produce consumption and textile wastage.

While there are a number of applications and programs already available that measure more popular eco-friendly resolutions such as recycling and paper consumption, there are none that measure water footprint directly. We conducted 20 user interviews to understand how people view sustainability.

Affinity Mapping

Our interviews revealed a wide net of user behaviors as well as sustainability issues users are concerned about. As we plotted them in the form of an affinity map and brainstormed areas to focus on, one fact became very evident — most users admitted to not thinking about water footprint when purchasing an item.

Interviewee Quote
"I don't really think about water footprint when I'm buying say, cheese. I mean...you don't really see that do you"

Design

The project itself aims at being a personal informatics application. Drawing upon theories of personal informatics design such as Norm Activation and “The Rider and the Elephant” (Haidt, 2006), Droplet encourages and enables users to make better in-the-moment behavior changes.

Key Features

On-demand water footprint score

The app allows users to scan an item's barcode and receive information about the item's water footprint instantaneously. This information is sourced from the app's database which contains an extensive collection of water footprints of various commonly purchased products. Droplet also displays less water-intensive alternatives for purchase.

Encouragement

One of the covenants of Personal Informatics Design is the need to offer encouragement to the user. A major challenge facing designers today is the 28-day problem — the fact that many users do not continue using apps beyond 28 days. In order to keep the user interested, we sought to show the user just how far they have come in their journey towards improving their water footprint. We did this in a simple manner — through words of encouragement and comparing a numerical value into normal terms such as the amount of water needed for a routine task like showering.

Self-reporting at the supermarket or restaurant

Droplet allows users to self report their water footprint while on a trip to the grocery store or while getting takeout at a restaurant through the app’s virtual shopping cart.

Final Product Video

And with these designs, we formally present to you: