Case study
iOS, Android, Wear OS, Apple Watch
2 Months
LWL8 is a smart hydration ecosystem designed to help people build healthier hydration habits. The mobile app works together with the smart bottle to provide timely reminders, automatic tracking, and simple insights that encourage consistent hydration.
In this case study, I walk through how I designed the end-to-end experience across iOS, Android, Apple Watch, and Wear OS, from research and problem definition to the final product.
I led the design of the LWL8 mobile experience from 0 → 1, shaping both the product thinking and execution.
End-to-end UX design (Research → Delivery)
UI design system and visual direction
Micro-interactions & motion design
Cross-platform design (Android, iOS, Widgets, Watch App)
Collaboration with product & engineering for real-world constraints
Product Designer (Me)
1
Engineers
2
Product Manager
1
RESEARCH
LWL8 began as a small team moving fast, trying to validate whether a connected bottle could realistically earn a place in someone’s daily routine — not as a gadget, but as a habit. With limited time, we focused on quick, directional research that could support confident decisions rather than exhaustive studies that would slow us down before we’d even proven the core idea.
The starting observation was almost embarrassingly simple: people carry water bottles everywhere — to their desks, to the gym, on every trip — and still manage to forget to drink from them. Hydration is one of the few habits nearly everyone already has the right equipment for, and still fails to maintain.
That gap between intention and behavior became the central question. This led us to a simple question: how could we help people stay hydrated without becoming another app that users eventually ignore? Rather than asking how to get people to drink more water, we asked something narrower: how do people actually remember to drink, and how do they respond when something reminds them?
We also wanted to know how physical routines help or hurt consistency, and how people track their intake today, if at all. Four questions, not forty — enough to point the design in the right direction without pretending we already knew the answer.
USER INTERVIEWS
Most users we spoke with already understood, in the abstract, why hydration mattered — they weren’t uninformed, and they already carried bottles to work, gyms, and on flights. What broke down wasn’t awareness. It was consistency. To understand why, we interviewed working professionals, fitness-focused users, students, and frequent travelers — a deliberately mixed group, chosen because each carries water differently and forgets it differently.
A desk-bound professional’s failure mode looks nothing like a traveler’s, and we wanted the research to reflect that instead of averaging it away.
The conversations were structured loosely around five themes: hydration timing, how people actually respond to reminders in practice, and what their current tracking experience looked like.
We also probed how the bottle fit — or didn’t fit — into daily routines, and the interruptions that broke consistency most often. Letting the conversation move across all five themes let patterns emerge on their own, rather than forcing answers into categories we’d decided on in advance.
INSIGHT 01
Users Forgot When to Drink
Most users already understood why hydration mattered, and most already carried a bottle.
During our research, we realized people weren’t lacking motivation—they simply forgot to drink water at the right time.
During focused work, meetings, workouts, or travel, people simply lost track of when they’d last taken a drink.
Nothing in their environment was built to remind them at the moment it would have actually helped — so the habit quietly failed, day after day.
“I realize I haven’t had water only when I feel exhausted.”
INSIGHT 02
Hydration Tracking Felt Easy to Ignore
Many of the people we spoke with had already tried a hydration app or a reminder system at some point.
Almost all of them had stopped using it.
The pattern was consistent: the reminders started useful, then became repetitive, then became noise — something to dismiss on reflex rather than act on.
A system that interrupts without adapting eventually trains people to stop listening to it.
“After a few days, I started swiping them away automatically.”
INSIGHT 03
Insights Didn’t Drive Action
People genuinely liked seeing their hydration stats — the charts, the totals, the streaks.
But liking the data and acting on it turned out to be two different things.
Viewing an intake graph rarely changed what someone did for the rest of the day.
Manually logging every glass of water was enough friction to make people quietly abandon the habit within a week.
“…but I disliked manually recording every intake.”
OBSERVATION
Interviews helped us understand what people said they did. We also observed people during their daily routines—at work, during workouts, while commuting, and while travelling—to validate those findings.
One pattern showed up everywhere we looked, independent of context: during travel especially, bottles were left behind or forgotten completely, often without the person noticing until they were already somewhere else.
COMPETITIVE GAP
We looked at what was already on the market — WaterMinder, HidrateSpark, Plant Nanny, and Hydro Coach among them — to understand what problems were already solved and where the real opening was.
These tools were, for the most part, genuinely good at tracking hydration. What they weren’t good at was maintaining hydration behavior over time.
Most leaned almost entirely on notifications and passive data visualization, both of which lose a user’s attention within weeks. Tracking existed; the underlying behavior it was supposed to support usually didn’t stick.
That gap — between logging water and actually building a lasting habit — is where LWL8 needed to differentiate.
01
Users forget when to drink, not just to drink.
02
Hydration tracking feels passive and easy to ignore.
03
Insights exist, but they don’t drive action.
04
Physical habits — like misplacing the bottle — break the experience entirely.
Automatic Reminders
Goal vs. Intake Tracking
Hydration Insights
Historical Tracking
Find My Bottle
Other Screens
CROSS-PLATFORM
WIDGETS
Hydration only works as a habit if checking it costs nothing. Widgets answer the research finding that opening an app is itself a friction point — by the time someone remembers to launch LWL8, the moment to drink has usually passed.
APPLE WATCH
The wrist is the lowest-friction surface of all — closer to the body than a phone in a pocket, and visible without unlocking anything. The same 8-shaped progress mark used throughout the app carries over here, so the ring reads as unmistakably LWL8 even at complication scale.
WEAR OS
Wear OS covers the same ground through tiles rather than complications, matching Android’s own design language instead of mirroring the iOS layout.
BEYOND SCREENS
Designing LWL8 involved much more than creating app screens. A meaningful part of the work happened underneath them: building reusable design-system components so the product could scale past a single feature without every new screen starting from zero.
Motion design was equally important. We hand-built lightweight vector animations in Figma paired with Lottie so movement stayed consistent — and light — across every platform the app runs on, from a phone screen down to a 44mm watch face.
99%
65%
80%
WHAT I LEARNED
Translate behavior into product decisions — research is only useful once it changes what gets built.
Design systems people can actually stick to, not just systems that look good in a single demo.
Even the simplest problems — like remembering to drink water — require thoughtful, human-centered design to solve for real.
Gamification and community-driven motivation to make consistency feel social, not solitary.