Ninja Level Water Drinking Habits: An App you can Print
A few years ago, doctors discovered that nature blessed me with multiple kidney stones. But, as it happens to lucky guys like me, I’ve never experienced strong pain or discomfort. After several successful and unsuccessful lithotripsies, the doctor would always say:
“Best thing you can do? Drink more water.”
As a patient, I wasn’t much excited but as a designer, I saw that first-class opportunity. It was the time to design a kick-ass water reminder app.
Trying to fix the world water-drinking issues seemed quite hard... I needed something more easily achievable. And since I was drinking the least at work I narrowed my mission down to “Empowering users at the office reach their daily water targets.”
I jumped into writing ideas, decomposed the office context, the reasons why I kept on not drinking enough water, sketching what I thought would work and created paper prototypes to test my ideas. I took into consideration different platforms: smartwatches, phones, and laptop. I checked the competition and tried a lot of the apps on the market. In fact, too many of them…
Every water motivation app failed.
I started thinking that either I was incapable of keeping a good habit or there was no digital app that could do the job for me.
Why did they fail?
- My phone and my watch didn’t know when I was thirsty or when was the last time I drunk water so the preset reminders kept failing
- Setting them up was not fun
- I ended up having too many reminders draining my Fitbit and phone battery
- My Fitbit would buzz in the middle of something, I would think “finish this in 2 minutes and go drink some water”. Once reminder was gone it would escape my brain, too.
- I quickly learned to cancel reminders automatically. They would pass by and not even affect me
But maybe it’s just me.
But then, I found a solution!
While experimenting I sketched a lot and kept statistics. I realised that the days the sketches were on my desk I was drinking much more water. And I did meet my target almost every single day! Every digital form of the app had flaws for me, but this seemed like a simple alternative.
Here is a simple design you can easily copy and draw yourself or download and print. Having it on my desk improved my water drinking habits significantly. My team tested the beta version and in a course of a year, we saw great benefits.
Some of the benefits of the paper design
- Spontaneous reminders that aren’t annoying or interrupting
- Ease in comparing goals and checking progress. Our competitive nature increased motivation.
- Paper can be easily adjusted to fit personal needs. Some of us preferred smaller papers where could be easily clipped on the notepad, be pushed in the laptop or stick on the screen. Others used an A4 size paper where you could track monthly progress.
- Other user’s reminders are visible so encourage everyone to drink more.
I will probably never get this on the App Store, but who cares?
