Drinking 8 glasses of water is a good base rule but the amount of water some should drink varies from person to person. Different factors will change the amount of water needed per individual: gender, age, height, weight, activity level, and more.

With this in mind, I helped develop a smart water bottle that would track your water consumption throughout the day. This bottle would know basic information about you like your age, gender, weight, and height. To get even more accurate, the bottle and its app are pulling data from other apps like your fitness trackers to know when you worked out last, and even your location and weather.

Before any ideation, I conducted with my team some research and invited some users to share their experiences and needs. Supported with dummy bottles of different sizes and shapes, one of the exercises was to ask them to choose their favorite bottle body, and bottle cap, and presented different ways of charging the bottle.

We started the ideation phase after studying the results of the research. The feedback from your target users is extremely valuable and will help you along the entire project.

After reviewing the first draft of concepts with our client, some modifications were made to the selected concepts, and prototypes were made for the first evaluation: volume, handling, mechanisms, and general design direction.

I searched for patterns that could be added to its surroundings to increase the grip of the bottle. The clients wanted to keep the body of the bottle the same color and material, so a slight depth to the pattern would create enough grip.

In parallel to developing the functionalities and aesthetic of the bottle, I was working alongside our engineers to develop different technical aspects of the smart water bottle. The main challenge of that project was to understand the capabilities and limitations of various electronic instruments to calculate the water level inside of the bottle.

During the research, one important feedback was to be able to open the bottle easily. The solution found was to place two magnets at opposite forces in the flipping cap and in the base of the cap. The magnets would repulse each other which would help opening the bottle very easily.

After reviewing the first prototypes, modifications were made and details were added, the technical compartment was moved from the top to the bottom. Another prototype was made and helped us find more details to improve.

The design of the bottle started with extremely valuable user research, then evolved many times after ideation, several prototype evaluations, and engineering challenges. The final design reflects simplicity and accessibility while being engineering advanced.

The user interaction had to be simple and intuitive. One of the focuses was for the user to have the possibility to see the water consumption without needing to use the app. A simple track shape LED indicator is showing the user's progress throughout the day.