A first-look at WaterWise: Zoom app-ifying our behavioral intervention

Iterating on our prototype through storyboards and wireflows.

From our brainstorming and ideation session, our team narrowed down from 35 ideas down to one solid idea that we were all excited for: a voice recognition-based Zoom app that uses trigger words to remind any given user to drink water.

With this idea in mind, we moved forward in the design process focusing on storyboarding and wireflows.

Some lingering questions ⚠️

Before splitting up and taking a stab at how we might implement our prototype, our team came together to consider what we felt were our biggest unanswered questions. Alongside this discussion, we assigned perceived risk to each question in terms of how critical we needed to address it in our prototype. Instructors’ Note: You can find a list of all these questions and their level of risk here.

Among our highest-priority questions, we wondered:

• Do people pay attention to Zoom enough to drink water, or does it have the opposite effect? Our behavioral intervention is largely dependent on people already paying attention in class or work; if people aren’t paying attention, then the anchor may not work.
• Is there enough motivation to both set anchors and adhere to them? If we fail to nail down a good motivator, then how will we ever get our users to use our system?
• Do anchors only work when they’re convenient? How do we get people to drink when it isn’t convenient? This concern specifically depends on the number of convenient moments in a person’s day. If that number is high, then convenience might be enough to promote healthy hydration.
• Does forcing attention to anchors detract from the experience of daily life in a way that is too disruptive? It’s important to comprehend the disruptiveness of the intervention for both learning and retention purposes, but this is slightly lower priority given that users can always choose to ignore/delete the app whenever they please

With these questions in mind, we split up and began storyboarding possible usage cases.

Storyboarding usage 🧐

Given our routiner persona’s typical makeup of homebodied remote college students, I made the storyboard below following a student named Adam, who takes cues from our participants:

Storyboard for the Zoom app’s potential usage (based on storyboards featured in the lecture slides).

Presenting this storyboard to two of our identified routiners, they both agreed that this is essentially what they expected based on their experience in the intervention study and gave it a thumbs up! 👍 They both especially liked the idea of having a bar on the side to show their progress, and thought the intervention made sense in context within Zoom’s interface.

One fun suggestion from a participant: add the option for tracking over time, such that there’s no pressure to keep up with the tracking of measurements but that information is readily accessible when desired.

An initial wireflow ✍️

Assured that the idea was received well, I sketched out the wireflow below, taking into account their feedback and suggestions. Note that the Settings/Preferences screen is not linked to other screens in the flow; this is because it’s embedded within Zoom’s Preferences panel, which exists in the top left menu bar.

Initial wireflow for Zoom app.

Some things to call out in this wireflow:

• In Zoom’s settings panel, the intervention appears as an option in the side menu; clicking this option exposes both long-term tracking information and trigger settings (setting trigger phrases, limiting when they’re triggered in a given time period, and so on).
• Before the meeting starts, participants have the ability to set their estimated meeting time (for the purposes of tracking water intake) and a goal intake amount (if they didn’t set a standardized goal in settings).
• The in-meeting experience is inspired in equal parts by exercise bike interfaces (since drinking water is an exercise of sorts!) and Jackbox TV games (for their engaging presentation of user inputs). To the side of the meeting is a percentage bar measuring the amount of water they’ve imbibed up until that point. Clicking this sidebar allows it to expand to feature more in-depth statistics and achievements (like badges) that can be won by meeting certain benchmarks.
• When a trigger phrase is uttered, it launches a drink animation that only the participant sees. These animations are random and meant to be engaging. The sidebar increments accordingly.
• After the meeting, the user sees a series of fun highlights, such as the amount of water consumed in the session, trigger phrase uttered most, and even suggests new phrases by semantically pulling phrases that appear in a certain frequency from the Zoom transcript.

Next steps 👍

I think this proposed implementation addresses a majority of our concerns, and most importantly addresses the question of motivation and how an otherwise out of the way interface may be designed to foster engagement. I’m excited by the direction our team is headed, and I look forward to bringing this proposed implementation to the team to see what favorite elements we can combine from all our attempts. I’m personally proposing the prototype name WaterWise… is it catchy? 😅