TapOff: informing, motivating, and gamifying water saving
Released by AUX Studio in January, TapOff is a free mobile app that not only provides Capetonians with real-time updates on the city’s water consumption, but inspires them to make positive changes that will have a lasting impact.
While Cape Town’s ongoing drought will certainly break at some point – and with it, the current watercrisis – it’s equally certain that the amount of water available will decrease over the long term. This means residents must permanently change their water-saving behaviour.
“Information alone doesn’t drive behavioural change,” says Trevor Swart of AUX. “The key is to summarise and frame it in a way that’s meaningful for the individual.” Besides displaying the city’s overall consumption for the week, TapOff enables residents to log their own water usage and compare it with the maximum amount prescribed by city authorities. In this way, individuals see how their efforts can make areal difference to a community-wide issue.
The app goes even further to encourage participation, gamifying water-saving with suburb leaderboards where residents can display their consumption figures. “The response has been great so far,” says Trevor, “with growing numbers of users posting their water usage to neighbourhood leaderboards on a monthly basis.”
AUX has also produced a public API that delivers Cape Town’s latest water statistics. This has opened up opportunities to drive awareness beyond the mobile app. “In partnership with Tractor Outdoor, we’ve created digital billboards to make a clear emotional connection with the viewer about Cape Town’s overall water consumption, putting the city’s progress quite literally front and centre. It’s also a friendly reminder to keep up water-saving efforts – whether you’ve downloaded TapOff or not.”
TapOff has featured in both the Play Store and the App Store as a top app in the Free Education category. AUX is currently looking for more partners and sponsors so that they can offer real rewards to water savers and engage hundreds of thousands of residents.
Download the TapOff app at http://www.tapoff.co.za
Contact AUX Studio at www.aux.co.za
TapOff has been featured on the following websites:
MEMEBURN: https://memeburn.com/2018/01/tapoff-cape-town-water-app/
FINANCIAL MAIL: https://www.businesslive.co.za/fm/fm-fox/gimme/2018-03-01-gimme-every-single-drop/
WHAT’S ON IN CT: https://www.whatsonincapetown.com/post/waterwise-initiatives-capetonians/
ORIGINAL PRESS RELEASE:
Gamification app summarizes the latest water crisis stats for Cape Town
Last year in March AUX conceptualized and built the TapOff app – an experiment to inspire people of Cape Town to save water. They wanted to make it easy for residents to have access to the latest and most important information, but also to promote the idea of per-person-per-day usage by household. At the time this information wasn't readily available. They also wanted to test a simple gamification idea to see if it would inspire people to take action and share ideas.
“At the time (March 2017) we felt like the drought and cape town water crisis was a great real-world problem to tackle. It seemed like a rewarding and worthy problem to tackle with real social impact.”
Client work got in the way during the course of 2017 and the project was put on ice. Then, in November 2017, the studio decided it was still a worthwhile project and completed the first version. We officially trickled the link to social media on the 27th January. Since then the app has been featured on Memeburn.com and has also been highlighted in both the Google PlayStore and the AppStore as a top app in the Free Education category last week.
At the moment, only residents with CoCT billls can calculate their per-person-per-day usage using the app calculator, and then post that result to their suburb leaderboard. Some people have rightly pointed out that this excludes residents without a water bill. The developers provided the following response to users in the app store:
“You've raised a great point here which we need to consider. We decided to release the product before it contained all the possible features we could build, otherwise we might never have launched at all, and we didn’t want that. We realise there are things that we have not conquered but we will get there as we gather feedback like this, learn and adapt. Plans to capture water usage in a different way are already underway.”
So far, the response has been great, and there are already hundreds of users who have posted their water use to the Cape Town leaderboard. Last week an update was released so that users per-person-per-day calculation is more visible and people can also navigate to their suburb. All users are created anonymously using a unique and creative naming system.
AUX is a product design studio based in Cape Town. They work with established businesses and start-ups providing naming, identity design, ux design and rapid-prototyping.
Link to the TAPOFF app http://www.tapoff.co.za
