DropTop

An app to help luxury hotels upgrade their water facilities in the face of an environmental crisis.

An app to help luxury hotels upgrade their water facilities in the face of an environnemental crisis.

At the start of 2018, the city of Cape Town faced a water shortage crisis that threatened to make the city's taps run dry by the end of April. To avoid the disaster, the population of Cape Town joined in a collective effort to reduce their water consumption to a level of 50 liters per person per day. Even as the crisis was avoided, the entire city had to adopt long term changes in their consumption habits has the threat remained present. At CIID, we decided to look at how the situation would affect the hotel industry and asked ourselves how hospitality business could continue to deliver high quality service in the eye of this water crisis.

At the start of 2018, the city of Cape Town faced a water shortage crisis that threatened to make the city's taps run dry by the end of April. To avoid the disaster, the population of Cape Town joined in a collective effort to reduce their water consumption to a level of 50 liters per day until the risk was aborted. Even as the crisis was avoided, the entire city had to change its consumption habits on a long term and adapt to the constant draught situation. At CIID, we decided to look at how the situation would affect the hotel industry and asked ourselves how hospitality business could continue to deliver high quality service in the eye of environnemental crisis.

'Five-Drop' Rating

Five Drop Rating

We imagined the five-drop rating as a new standard for the hotel industry to use their water efficiency alongside the other ratings they currently use to communicate the quality of their facilities. DropTop is an app designed to help hotel managers reach a higher rating by planning upgrades to their facility in regards to the water savings they will offer.

Planning facility improvements

After trying a linear flow where the user starts by planning a goal and then selects upgrades to reach it, we came up with a solution centred around the core interaction of picking upgrades from the start, with the rating goal changing as a consequence.

Goal-Oriented App

The way the Drop rating is used in the app is inspired by a gamification technique found in many goal-oriented app where the next level is used to motivate users towards making progress. In the app, we wanted to encourage hotel managers to add upgrades to their planning list according to the rating they wanted to reach for their hotel.

Defining the flow

Before jumping into the visual design of the app, we spent the first days of the project iterating around the flow of the app to focus on reaching a coherent model of the app's architecture.

Built around one main screen

The app's flow is built around an evolving list view where the manager can consult their list of planned upgrade and add new items to it. We built a demo in Principle to display the succesion of the main screen's different states along a user journey (see the video).

The app's flow is built around an evolving screen where the manager can consult his current list of planned upgrade and add to it. After several rounds of paper prototyping to refine the UX flow of the app, a demo was built in Principle to show the succesion of the main screen's different states along a user journey.