Adrift

I’ve always been drawn to the sea and have always been disgusted by the trash. Adrift aims to help instil a sense of duty to keep our beaches clean.

Adrift came about as an idea after picking up a huge amount of litter from my local beach. We’ve all seen the videos and pictures of turtles & seabirds caught in plastic and nets, and let’s be honest it’s depressing and we want to ignore it as best we can. I know I did. But then I took our dog for a walk on the local beach and within twenty minutes filled several bags with a variety of rubbish, from chunks of metal, plastic bottles and fishing nets.

It shocked me to realise that this issue wasn’t affecting far away lands, but could be less than a mile from my front door. To be honest I had a brief period of despair, I couldn’t collect every bit myself. Fortunately that feeling passed quickly when I thought about it more and realised I could do something about it. A lot of designers come up with radical solutions to problems and I am sure this project will have the same effect but personally I felt I needed to do something.

I quickly realised I needed to think about the target audience for the app. “Who was important to target with this?” was key thought out. I noticed a lot of the current marketing and information is aimed at young adults, ages between 18 - 30, so I wanted to aim lower. Obviously a lot of younger children won’t have a smart phone, and to cover that I wanted to make the app suitable for families, the idea being that a family on a beach day could make a game out of keeping the beach clean as part of their day.

Sketches

The first step was getting the inital ideas out on to a page. I had all these ideas and thoughts running around my mind.

There was some key elements that would be carried across to the high fidelity designs. These include the scene at the top and the icons.

Designs

This was the main design section of the app, which was the hardest part. After making the various illustrations and sketches I needed to wire it all up together and create a functional app. To this end I started thinking about how the clean could work: How would a user start a clean? Choose a location? Track the items they have picked up? All important questions that I needed to answer as I started designing.

Sign Up/In

Sign up and user login are intended to enable a user to keep track of previous cleans. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and only collect the bare minimum amount of data from the user, this is especially important with an app aimed at younger people and families.

But before they even get to the login I'd wanted to set the scene and created the splash screen illustration. I've been slowly adding details and elements to it and hope to fill it with various sea creatures as time goes on. Though I am no illustrator, I will happily try anything I need to, when I need to.

Start cleaning

Starting a clean needed to include a few bits of important information, mainly where the clean is taking place. The plan for this was that the data collected by the app could be anonymised and made available to researchers to help in studies. Given the remoteness of some beaches this location data is designed to work offline and would rely on a simple database of beach names from a given country.

The initial offering will be the Wales only with a plan to expand outwards to the rest of the UK before going further.

Cleaning inprogress

After the clean has started you will be presented with a count down, the aim of which was to gameify the cleaning and make it more fun for the participants. The hope is that by doing so it could encourage people to use the app more. With the quick add features it allow a user to quickly add generic and/or common items found on beaches with a ‘rubbish search’ feature to help search for more specific items. The initial app would only have a limited number of objects to choose from, but as the data comes in, it can be analysed and studied to find trends from which we can add and refine the options in the app.

Editing & deleting your entries

Edit and delete are always key when you are adding elements to a list. I wanted to keep the focus on the search so moved the edit/delete options to a swipe feature, one that you pull left or right on the item to see the options. Understandably this isn’t the most intuitive solution but through some testing most people understood how it worked. I intend to do some wider usability testing in the future on this topic and am aware swiping in such a way will not be accessible for all users and will look to find a suitable solution to cater for those needs.

Cleaning complete

Ending a clean will provide a congratulatory message and then review the clean with the user, before offering them the ability to upload it to the database. This is all part of the security in the app and is intended to ensure the user has full control over all the data they produce. Previous cleans will be available to view within the app and the user will be able to upload the data at a later time should they so wish.

Next steps

The next steps with this app designs are to begin trying to build a proof of concept app with code. I have some experience with HTML, CSS and a little bit with JavaScript and hope to use this knowledge to build at least a basic version of the app.

Several elements are without a doubt out of my reach for the mean time, but I hope with some time and patience I will be able to achieve my goal of getting this app developed and released. I currently don’t have a time scale for this but am continually learning and trying to apply it to this so I will say in the near future.

Please check back to for updates!