As a supplement to a design fellowship application I was challenged with finding a company I believed in and designing a new addition to their product line.
I chose Nest, and challenged myself to stay aligned with their mission, target audience, and design language.
I owned this project in it's entirety – design research, ideation, wireframing, visual design and animation.
Place: My apartment
Duration: 1 week
Tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, Keynote, AfterEffects, Premire Pro
We have all heard of California's drought problem, especially after Governor Jerry Brown’s official announcement saying that it’s the worst water crisis since the 1600’s. What can people do? One thing could be to take shorter showers. If a single person decreased the length of their shower by just a minute, they’ll save 2.5 gallons of water. Assuming that person showers every day, they would save over 9,000 gallons annually. The problem lies within awareness and human behavior. People may have good intentions, but to create behavior change, there has to be a way to seamlessly integrate this awareness into people’s daily routine.
As always, the first step was to talk to people. After speaking with a handful of friends and family, I realized that it’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they don’t notice. If I was to remind someone about the realtime impact of their water usage each time they turned on a faucet, they will probably use considerably less than usual. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the time people are thinking about other things when they turn on a faucet and don't realize their realtime impact. I ideated around these micro reminders for a while but then I asked the question, is awareness enough? How might this product leverage other aspects of human behavior?
1. Talked with friends and family members about their water usage, shower habits, and their experience with other forms of behavior change - diet, exercise, personal finance, etc.
2. Synthesized the findings and found opportunities in leveraging micro reminders, competition, and realtime feedback.
3. Mocked up a few different designs and showed them to people to see if they saw value in the product.
4. Refined the design keeping in mind Nest’s design language and produced the current iteration.
People are naturally competitive, especially with themselves. It’s how we grow in various aspects of life. Imagine a high jumper in training. They set the bar, jump over it, and raise the bar. Each time they go to jump, that bar serves as a reminder of what they have accomplished and what they have to beat. Without that bar, they would have no way to gauge how high they are jumping or how much they are improving. Rain allows people to set that bar with their water usage and continue to beat it and improve each day.
1. Turn it on and set temperature.
-
2. Take your shower and notice the realtime effects of time and water pressure on meeting your goal.
3. Raise the bar by finishing your shower in less water than the average shower in your household.
4. Come back the next day and do it again.
-
Since this was a product for Nest, I wanted to keep the design language consistent. The branding, the typography, and the radial dial aesthetic and interaction model all carried over into the design of Rain.
