This design is the extension of an interview process that I recently had with a company. For the second interview, there was an assignment of creating a set of rough sketches for a water conservation mobile app. Unfortunately, I did not get the position, but I took the opportunity to take the designs from rough sketches to a final set of mockups.
The application is called “Pour Fish” and is a water usage tracking application for the iPhone. My approach for this was two-pronged. First, I conceived an idea of the user having ownership for their water usage through the ownership of a living organism that was closely associated with water. I originally thought of plants, but plants don’t have personalities. Keeping a fish alive by reducing your intake was something a user could easily see.
My second thought was just how accurate should this application be. Without the use of extra hardware installed throughout the home, the use could never be accurate. I decided to go with an estimation approach based on length of use and the activity in which the water was used. Since the app was about understanding how much water you were using, and reducing that, I felt an estimated approach was appropriate.
Your use would be compared to that of the average citizen in nation you lived in and could be changed in the settings to increase the difficulty of driving down your water use.
Thank you for taking the time to check this out.