DrinkPal

Project Type
Academic Project

Team
6 people

Duration
4 Months

Background

Alcohol consumption on college campuses is a pervasive problem. In 2015, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that 58% of college students drank alcohol in the past month.

Excessive drinking, an issue linked to binge drinking, contributes to an array of negative personal and social problems such as drunk driving, sexual assault, and alcohol poisoning.

We aim to design an application to facilitate safe & responsible drinking, as college students are likely to take binge drinking as a given, accepting its prevalence and falling into the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done to alleviate its toll. We hope to decrease alcohol-related issues due to excessive drinking and minimize negative outcomes from it.

Interviews & Findings

We conducted user interviews to learn about users' common experience of drinking on campus. The goal was to collect general information about college students’ drinking habits and resulting behaviors.

Sample Questions

What are the reasons of drinking?
When was the last time you went out to drink?
What are your drinking habits?
Can you walk us through a typical day/night that you go out to drink?
Are you able to keep track of how many drinks you’ve had? If so how?
Are you able to stop drinking when you want to?
At what point do you think you should stop drinking?
What's the point that you think you need to stop?

Affinity Diagram

Key Insights

Users think keeping track of drinking amount would help them stay controlled.
Users would likely NOT have a sense of when should stop drinking when having fun.
Users tend to regret drinking too much the next day and would like to develop a better self-control habit.
Users want some suggestions during and after drinking events.
Being able to keep track of drinking condition is helpful for users.
A simple and easy to use device can be helpful. Doesn't need to be fancy.

Goals

Based on our research, we have concluded to address the following goals in our design:

Keeping track of the number of drinks
Drinking safely
Remembering more about what happened while they were drinking
Maintaining a balance between social life and their academics

Storyboarding

Personas

Ideation

How It Works

Blood Alcohol Content (BAC): A concept that refers to the percentage of alcohol in a person's bloodstream, and can be measured after drinking.

BACtrack SKYN: A wearable alcohol monitor that tracks alcohol content effortless. It measures the alcohol coming from the user's skin and gives an estimate of the alcohol level in real-time.

Screen Shot 2020-08-10 at 1.44.48 PM.png

Learn More

Brainstorm

We planned to develop an IOS app and a smartwatch app to support the use of BACtrack SKYN.

Below were some features that we had considered in our initial design:

Low-fi Prototype

We asked a couple users to test out the low-fi design, and found the following potential improvements in our initial design:

The use of the smartwatch is redundant.
Some features are less needed.

Design & Implement

Wireframing

Evaluate & Improve

Usability Testing

To understand how users felt about the design, we conducted usability test among 10 selected users.

Here are some insights we found:

Functions should be color coded: Better, simpler visualization for easy navigation
Drinking/Not drinking modes: Reducing clicking by creating direct access to commonly used features while drinking
More support should be given to reduce the chance and impact of getting drunk