Hydration Tracking
Drink, Sweat, Track, Repeat.
Client
Garmin
Services
Visual Design UI & UX Design
Platforms
iOS Android Web
Date
March 2018
Project
Hydration Tracking
Team
1 Product Owner
1 UX Designer
2 iOS Developers
2 Android Developers
1 Web Developer
2 API Devs
3 QAs
1 Copy Writer
Timeline
6 Months
My role
Lead UX Designer, Subject Matter Research, UX | UI Design
Overview
With the introduction of the Venu smartwatch, we aimed to add a new hydration tracking feature to enhance the existing feature set. This addition moves Garmin one step closer to its broader goal of whole health and wellness tracking—one of the company’s key strategic initiatives.
You would think managing your hydration would be simple and easy. At first glance it is.
When you dig a little deeper, there are hundreds of hydration-tracking apps out there using different methods and equations to get you as hydrated as you need to be.
Garmin, knowing how important hydration is to good health wanted to bring tracking your water intake where you track everything else, activities, workouts, steps.
The harder you work, the more water leaves your body in the form of perspiration. Our goal was let you track how much water you take in and how much is leaving your body so you can stay hydrated.
Goals
Research
I conducted user interviews with dozens of coworkers outside the project and users within our ecosystem to better understand how people manage hydration in their daily routines.
I aimed to gauge how users perceive the importance of hydration tracking and its role in their daily health and wellness routines.
You’d think managing hydration would be simple—and on the surface, it is. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find hundreds of hydration tracking apps, each using different methods and equations, all aiming to help you stay properly hydrated.
From the observations and user research we learned that people tend to use 3 primary vessels for fluids.
1. A cup for coffee or tea in the morning
2. A container for water during the day
3. A container or container for the evening
Doing research on drinking water we discovered that there is not true specific amount of water an individual needs to drink per day to remain healthy.
There was a particular method to drinking water that was proven to be effective; take small but frequent sips versus drinking a whole cup at a time.
Process
My observations influenced how I would design the interface to input daily fluid increments. I did some low-fi drawings of how it fit in with out current design patterns.
To understand the landscape, I analyzed a range of hydration tracking products, from standalone apps to features within fitness platforms. This helped identify common patterns, strengths, and gaps in how hydration is tracked, visualized, and personalized across the industry.
Do we use a numeric entry method or visual?
I downloaded a few of them to test further, used them for about a week. I thought a couple were really good. The ones that you had to type in the amounts and units were a bit cumbersome and clunky. It wasn't quick. I would lose interest in doing this fast.
I took my findings and started drawing some wireframes of how they could fit in our ecosystem.
I made some prototypes to test with users. It scored really well and achieved our requirements so I went forth with the designs.
I based my design on the findings of what users naturally did, gave them a button for each container. In settings, you could configure each button with a different amount, the defaults were 8 oz, 16 oz and 24 oz. And you could set them to cups, ounces and milliliters.
I wanted to be able to customize the containers with icons that the user could set making it more personal, but that would be a lot of overhead and the idea was shot down.
After some initial hi-fi drawing were done, I worked with the device UX team to see if the solution would work on the watch face as well as the mobile app and website.
The hydration tracking project resulted in a more holistic wellness experience within the Garmin ecosystem. By integrating daily water intake tracking into the Connect app and wearable devices, users gained a clearer understanding of how hydration impacts their performance, recovery, and overall health. The feature encouraged healthy habits through personalized reminders and trend visualizations, driving higher daily engagement and reinforcing Garmin’s commitment to full-body health tracking.