DRINKTION: Designing a better, safer drinking experience for users

Jacinda E., Olivia M., Tina T., Yufan M.

Problem and Solution Overview

We don’t think that it is a stretch to say that one vital component of an adult’s life is drinking alcohol, especially one’s social life. That is why it is extremely important that people who decide to drink are able to do so safely and comfortably. However, we know that since drinking is often a habit developed at a slightly younger age, people do not always develop the best drinking habits or know of safe drinking practices to follow. Thus, we want to provide inexperienced drinkers with a mobile application that provides them with safe drinking practices to learn and follow.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

The target group of users for our app is young adults of legal age to drink who feel inexperienced and want to learn more about drinking safely. We have defined inexperienced drinkers as individuals who lack understanding in knowing how much alcohol should be consumed based on their physical health and body type, the varying levels of alcohol in different beverages, and alcohol safety practices. Other stakeholders to this project include family and friends that these individuals spend time with, the bartenders/waiters at the social events that serve these individuals and the alcohol companies that receive the profit from selling their alcoholic beverages.

In order to learn more about our target group, we decided to first send out a survey on Instagram, Reddit, and Edstem. We wanted to use a survey as part of our research design in order to obtain a large amount of data that we could analyze. We also thought that this would be the most convenient way of collecting data as it was lower commitment for the survey takers and more hands-off for us. This group of respondents had a varied amount of experience drinking, so not everyone was a part of our target group. However, this data provided us with a pool of participants to choose from for the next step of our research process: interviews. From this pool, we chose four interviewees to learn more about their experiences drinking. These four interviewees all identified themselves as inexperienced drinkers and students at the University of Washington. We decided to conduct interviews after sending out surveys because interviews are a great way to learn about individuals’ personal experiences in greater depth. Since surveys were just a way to get short answers, we wanted to interview participants who could tell us about their feelings during certain situations and provide us with more detailed information about their experiences drinking alcohol. In combination, surveys and interviews were able to give us both quantitative and qualitative data.

Design Research Results and Themes

Our team surveyed 63 participants ranging from ages 18–29 by asking questions regarding their knowledge about drinks and alcohol levels along with personal past experiences with drinking. We learned that some participants never had a negative drinking experience while some had up to 7 negative experiences. Quite a few safety practices were also mentioned by these participants of things they wish they knew beforehand (i.e., drinking with water and not on an empty stomach along with knowing your limit) which is helpful in informing us what participants already know and what they could learn. Below are some fascinating statistics we learned from our surveyees.

For the interview research method, we interviewed 4 participants who considered themselves as inexperienced drinkers and asked follow-up questions based on the survey. Participants noted that there was a guilty feeling when they first started drinking due to prior bad perceptions of others drinking. Many of the negative drinking experiences mentioned by the interviewees were due to feeling sick such as vomiting. Interviewees wanted to see a personalized and gamified design with our system to practice safe drinking.

Below are the three overall themes we discovered from our design research.

• Negative drinking experiences are common and defined by feeling socially pressured or feeling sick after drinking.
• Prefer drinking with close family and friends as participants feel safer as they
• Many participants don’t know the difference between drinks and recommended alcohol intakes.

These themes suggest that our design identifies tasks for which users can learn the repercussions of over-drinking to prevent themselves from doing so, assign a trusted friend to watch their drink or be around them while drinking, and understand the amount of alcohol each drink has and the recommended intake for each type of drink.

Proposed Design

When approaching our proposed solution, we were debating whether to do it on a smartphone or a smartwatch. At first glance, we thought a smartwatch would be a great idea because it is small and discrete, making it easy for the user to use our solution without being judged by their friends. However, we ultimately decided to go with a smartphone because all of our interview participants mentioned that they always have their phones when they’re going out. Making our design available on mobile devices will ensure that users can use our drink function application on-the-go such as at a bar or a restaurant in a convenient, non-hassle way. Additionally, as mobile devices are a common necessity in people’s daily lives, this makes our proposed solution more accessible and reach a wider range of users who are interested in drinking more safely.

Our initial design approach was to create a mobile application that showed users information about alcoholic drinks including the alcohol percentages of various drinks, although as we interviewed candidates from our research surveys, a common problem young adults have are remembering how much alcohol they consumed based on which drinks they have had and how many drinks they remember having. We then realized that it would be beneficial to create a design that allowed users to keep track of the number of drinks they have consumed by entering it into the app at the time they order or have a drink. This allows the users to have more awareness of their alcohol intake and prevent over drinking.

Furthermore, another feature that we included was to help users prepare before drinking. Based on our interview responses, most of our participants mentioned that they sometimes forget to eat before drinking which causes them to get drunk more quickly and feel sick the next day. One way to remedy that is to have a checklist feature to help remind our users to eat a meal beforehand and drink lots of water to prevent being dehydrated as a consequence of consuming alcohol.