Apple Watch App: WASH

Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer, Prototyping
Team: Collaboration with 3 team members
Timeline: 3 weeks

Our Goals

1. To ease the panic and anxiety surrounding COVID-19

2. To give back the sense of control and eliminate the feeling of helplessness

Summary

The WASH app was a project my team and I came up with for my UX/UI course. WASH is an Apple Watch App that is designed to help users keep up with the CDC guideline of washing their hands for 20 seconds, every two hours. The app’s design is inspired by the apple watch Ring app and includes reminder notifications and hand wash tracking statistics.

The Research

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was new and panic-inducing, we decided to create an app that would give back a sense of control. (Note: this was created when the only CDC recommendations were to wash your hands constantly and avoid touching your face. Masks were not mandatory yet and quarantine had not begun.)

To get a better idea of how to do this we conducted interviews to better understand:

1. What makes people anxious about the contagious illnesses like the flu?

2. What do people need to feel less anxious about contagious illnesses like the flu?

Our key discoveries were that:

1. People are anxious when they don’t have control over their health

2. Taking protective actions make people feel in control

3. The novelty of COVID-19 makes it difficult to know what actions to take

Based off this insight, we created a user persona named Maddie: a typical urban professional who has mild anxiety over COVID-19.

She is more concerned with how COVID-19 will affect her daily life than the disease itself. She tries to wash her hands more frequently but struggles to remember to do so.

The interview content was then used to create a feature matrix which highlighted the impact and desirability of check-lists and gamification.

Design Inspiration

We brainstormed ideas on how to track hand washing and found inspiration from Ring - an apple watch app that tracks it’s users’ daily movements. We redlined patterns that we planned to incorporate into our own app.

Originally we created a user flow that involved direct interaction with the app but since the app’s goal was too keep hands clean, we decided against it. Instead we simplified it so that everything can be done passively, without touching the screen.

• The watch buzzes to let you know the 20-second countdown has started, and buzzes again when the 20 seconds are up.

• A glanceable push notification then let’s you know if you didn’t wash long enough.

We created a droplet icon that served as a meter, which would rise and lower depending on how often the user washes their hands and whether they completed the 20 seconds. This droplet icon is featured on the watch face so that the user can glance at the meter whenever they check the time. It is also featured on the reminder notification.

We also created a stats page where the user can take a look at the up-to-date summary of their washing activity. This can be reached from the end-of-the-day congratulatory notification or the droplet icon on the watch face. The stats page shows the time since the last wash, hand wash count for the day and how many washes completed the full 20 seconds.