Drop

Much has been said about the benefits of living "greener," but few people take significant action to achieve that. If we can make reducing water use fun, people will be more likely to actually make changes to help conserve this precious resource. Our app is intended to help people increase awareness about water usage and to motivate change accordingly. We've created a gamified water-use and water-saving tracking app, where users can log specific water-saving actions to accumulate "drops" that they can use to water a plant or purchase new plants and grow their garden. Ultimately, users will be able to learn about water-saving tactics, log their actions, tend their expanding garden, and view the tasks and gardens of their friends.

Mathieu Rolfo
development

Megan Lu
design, user testing

Kelsey Josund
manager, documentation, web development

Game

The key metric for users is score: you have a certain number of Drops (proportional to the amount of water you have saved). You also have a running total of lifetime Drops accumulated. You get drops by completing tasks, like taking a shower less than nine minutes, getting a new showerhead, or entering a monthly usage bill below your historical average. You maintain a list of tasks that you want to accomplish, and can look in the app's task library to find additional ones you want to add to your list. Every day, you get a certain amount of baseline Drops in your bucket: this is proportional to current reservoir levels in your area (accessible through government website APIs). You need to give your plant a certain number of Drops daily for it to grow (watering your plant).

As described above, the user also needs to accumulate Drops. This is done by finding tasks and completing them. For the shower example, the app will start a timer and the user will stop it when they finish showering (9 mins - time spent showering = number of drops gained). The shower task will be added to their list of completed tasks.

Design Progression

Originally, we conceptualized the app as an "energy resource hub", where users could get information about their resources of all kinds -- where they came from, what average resource use is for their area, and how politics fit into their resources. Later, we shifted to motivating water-saving behavioral change by showing users lots of information about their water use. They would connect to their other social media accounts, enter their location, and input their water usage via their monthly bill. This would allow the application to give users personalized suggestions regarding how to save water: people who had a bill well above average for their cohort would get simpler suggestions, since they probably aren't already doing them. People with bills at or below average would get more advanced water saving tips. Local political information regarding water usage would also be accessible through the app.

Eventually we abandoned this tack and focused on a gamified, water-only application in order to have a more complete concept and more functional motivation for behavioral change. This current iteration allows for a more frequent feedback loop, requiring users to login daily in order to take care of their plant, and requires less tedious logging, with users just checking a box rather than finding and copying datapoints from their bill each month. It's also more fun to care for a plant than to compare graphs, if less precise.