Save the world… one shower at a time? Ideation Sprint
By: Gordon Tran
Tags: Prototyping, Product Management, Ideation, Sustainability, Wireframe

As we finally near the finale of the seemingly never-ending year, it was hard to ignore all the current world issues that happened in 2020. The installment of the Climate Clock in Union Square NYC signals that we only have a little over seven years left before we reach irreversible damage done to the environment. As I drive past it, I am reminded of the wildfires that ran rampant in California and Australia, and the exhausted list of hurricane names, all happening due to climate change.

During my transition from an Environmental major to an Information Science major, the goal I had to help raise awareness and protect the environment stuck with me. My lovely friend, Alyssa Zhang, and I were both passionate about the environment and wanted to encourage others to think about sustainability in their everyday activities… but how? Both of us came to the conclusion that water conservation was a big topic this year, and is also often overlooked. When we were given the chance to enter the incubator program, Propel, we knew exactly what to do.

Inspired by the effectiveness and use of productivity apps all around us on campus, and our passion for sustainability, Shower Power was born.

Shower Power is an interactive app that encourages users to think about conserving water in the shower with the use of their phone.

Another mission I hoped that Shower Power could accomplish is to show that technology is an amazing tool that can be utilized to bring change to the environment.

How exactly will showers do anything?

Something I quickly came to realize is that there was a general consensus that yes, we need to conserve water. But why? Why is water conservation important? Isn’t it a natural and renewable source?

While coming up with the idea of Shower Power, I was surprised to find out a few things. It turns out that Only 2–3% of water on Earth is freshwater and .5% is drinkable. If we use too much of it up too quickly, the water cycle can’t keep up with purifying it and distributing it resulting in droughts. This source is not as infinite as we think.

The lack of understanding and therefore lack of incentive to conserve water is the problem that Shower Power is trying to tackle.

The Water Research Foundation tells us that showers are the second-largest source of water in residencies. 1.2 trillion gallons of water are used in the United States for just showering. With Shower Power, if we aimed to reduce showers by just 20%, that is over 200 billion gallons saved each year!

Beginning our mission

With excitement in the air, it was time to plan out what we wanted to do. We started Shower Power at Propel, an incubator program at Cornell, and realized our timeline was rather short. With that in mind, we decided to make the short term goal of Shower Power be a working prototype, and the long term goal to be launching it on the app store.

You can check out the timeline we stuck to below!

Researching our Showerers

To assess how big our problem area is, we started off our user-research by creating a survey using Qualtrics. We then posted it to large environmental-focused Facebook groups. After closing our polls, we found out a few interesting things!

1. Most people use their phones as part of their shower routine.

2. Most people find showers relaxing.

3. Most people do not feel pressured to shorten their shower length

4. Of the people who did use productivity apps, they felt stressed using it

5. They also were more likely to accomplish their goals

Combining this with some user interviews we conducted, we were able to conclude a few things about the solution we had to create. The first being that making our idea into a phone app would make it easy for users to seamlessly incorporate this into their shower routine. When asked to give an exact number for their shower length, many people claimed they were unsure. Of the people who did give a number, they told us that they guessed using how many songs played on their phone while they showered.

Second, while we planned to make our product a productivity timer, a good amount of people expressed that they felt stressed while using them. This contradicts with the data that shows people found showers relaxing. We had to find a way to make sure we preserve the relaxing properties of showers while still making our app effective in shortening them.

Third, people understood the implications of climate change and action had to be done but were unsure of how to do so. With Shower Power, I want to encourage users to think about the impact they have.

Brainstorming

Shower Power is an idea that was able to develop quickly because of the passion both Alyssa and I had for the environment. Our excitement in turning this idea into an actual product made us brainstorm a sea of different “what-ifs” and problem spaces we wanted to work on. We sat down and ideated many solutions on post-it notes. This process sparked so much motivation within the team. Just thinking about all these features we could implement concretely showed us that this topic is of importance to us.

During our market research, we discovered that there was not much being done to address water usage. This motivated us even more to create a way to help others track and increase their awareness of water conservation. In essence, our app is a productivity timer. We conducted market research on different types of productivity timers out there on the app stores. We looked at mostly Forest and Flora, analyzing their features to see what people generally look for in an interactive timer app.

After exhausting all our ideas, we organized everything into a few groups that helped cleanly break down our app into a few features.

After our brainstorming session, the original categories we envisioned Shower Power would address were: Timing, Personal Incentive, Progress, Environmental Incentive, and Interaction.

Finalizing our Ideas

From there, we worked closely with our mentors Yuxuan and Joanne to narrow down features that we thought the MVP should include. This ended up not including the Interaction feature — which is something that we still want to do, just not within the timeline we had.

Below are our final features we ended up designing and implementing into our prototype

Timer

Initial wireframing of the timer feature

The main feature we wanted Shower Power to have for the MVP is the timer feature. We decided to give users 3 different shower lengths that they can choose from. Each option will be a range, rather than a specific number. We did this in order to remove the stress that comes from being timed in the shower, and preserve the relaxation factor of a shower.

Personal Incentive

Initial wireframing of our badges and rewards page

The second feature we wanted to implement was a reward system. We decided to give out badges and prizes when certain achievements are reached, such as “3 Day Streak” or “500 Gallons saved”. I hoped that this would motivate the user to continue to use the app, and feel a sense of reward.

During this stage, we also had the idea to include an aquarium that also acted as a reward. Every successful shower will hatch a new fish to add to your aquarium! You can see some of the fish you can collect below.