project
Shower Tune
Personal Project
Spring 2020
UX Design
Interaction Design
Fullstack Web Development
I took on this project to meet a brief from Creative Conscience, an organisation that encourages creatives to take on socially valuable projects. The brief was to design something to help create conciousness around consumption. My design received a commendation in the 2020 Creative Conscience awards. I decided to focus on consumption of water and energy in the home. I found that showers are the biggest consumer of water in the home and also burn through a lot of energy. I explored ways of creating a digital product that could enhance the shower experience while raising the user's awareness of the time they were spending in the shower, helping them work towards a shorter shower. My final submission was a mobile application which aims to encourage the user to take a shower for the duration of one perfect shower tune. The app integrates with the user's Spotify account to generate recommendations based on their tastes which can be tweaked based on the user's current mood.

Showers are the biggest consumer of water in the home.

The average shower lasts around eight minutes and uses 65 litres of water.

How might we encourage people to take shorter showers?

Insight - People who have a clock in their shower spend on average 20-30% less time in the shower

How might we create an enjoyable shower experience that helps people be more aware of how long they are spending in the shower?

The shower time suggested by organisations such as WaterAid and Waterwise is around 3-5 minutes - roughly the length of a typical song.

How might we encourage people to listen to one song for the duration of their shower?

Some existing solutions...

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Y&R London’s “4 minute shower hits” Spotify playlist for WaterAid
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WaterAid’s campaign to encourage people to listen to “Three Lions” in the shower during the 2018 World Cup
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Sanlam’s free album of 2 minute songs specially recorded by South African Artists.

Personalisation is Powerful

While these existing products provide songs of appropriate length for a shorter shower, they do not provide the type of personalised experience we have become accustomed to online today.

"The best thing about shower music is that it lets me, a morning shower-er, deliberately set the tone for the rest of my day."

-Chloe Bryan, Mashable

How might we help the user find the perfect shower track for their mood?

Music recommendation algorithms

Many streaming services use recommendation algorithms to suggest tracks to their users’ based on previous listening habits

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Spotify Integration

Spotify provides an API which allows developers to create applications that make use of their recommendation service. Users are able to securely grant access to their listening data to provide a more personal experience.

The following user journey was designed for an implementation of this technology to allow a user to generate a recommended track to listen to in the shower...

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This user journey was then imagined as a mobile app...

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A flow was also designed for non-Spotify users to select a “Continue without Spotify option”, allowing music taste to be manually selected and playback via YouTube...

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Final Prototype

A high-fidelity prototype of the app was developed using React which is available to try at:

www.showertune.app

My design received a commendation at the 2020 Creative Concience awards