We love to challenge the status quo at 3drops. When we stumble upon an interesting idea we sometimes spend around one week on articulating and prototyping our vision.

Our modern world is constructed to keep us in a seated position and most of us don’t even know it.

We sit in our cars, in our offices, around our dinner tables and in our couches. We go to bed, the cycle repeats and a clear pattern emerges; life has turned on us by becoming too comfortable. If we don’t act now, chances are we one day will find ourselves living in the reality predicted by Pixar’s WALL-E, where obese humans are carried around in hovering wheelchairs because their bones are unable to support their body weight.

Clearly, this is a not a desirable scenario. Prolonged sitting harms the natural curvature of the lower back and has, in recent years, become such a problem that the chair has been stigmatized as the worst invention in human history. This might sound like an exaggeration but in truth isn’t! Physical inactivity is one of the leading factors for premature death, warns a study conducted by World Health Organization. Basically, walking is awesome, sitting stinks and we have the evidence to prove it. But worryingly so, the Institute for the Future at Phoenix Research Institute (2011) predicts a large increase in computational work in our near future, leading to the conclusion that jobs which require sitting for long periods of time are on an upswing.

On the contrary, we know that walking is a life saver. A study shows that walking around for two minutes every hour can increase our lifespan by 33 %, compared to those who don’t. Thus, walking is probably the easiest way to counteract the dangers of prolonged sitting. This raises an interesting question: Will wearing a step counter make us walk more and sit less? According to a study conducted in the UK, the answer is yes! Researchers found that the simple act of wearing a pedometer (an old school step counter) significantly decreased sitting time while increasing physical activity. Thus, a fitness tracker motivates its wearer to move in lieu of sitting which paves the way for a healthier lifestyle. By having knowledge about our physical health, we gain the power to improve it.

The Problem

In light of this opportunity, VCs and Angel investors have poured money into startups that promise to improve our health. Since Nike announced its FuelBand in early 2012, numerous competitors began offering similar devices with little difference in functionality and feel. There’s a myriad of gimmicky devices to pick from that help track steps, ranging from the $349 Apple Watch to the $25 Xiamoi Mi Band Pulse. Whatever you decide to spend on a step counting device, it’ll get the job done.

This is all well and done. But what most people don’t realize is that everyone with an iOS device later than iPhone 5c (about 75 % of all iPhone users) have a perfectly competent step counter in their phone. It is hidden deep within the awkward and pre-installed ‘Health’ app that you probably never opened. It is an unintuitive, complex app that doesn’t encourage usage. This is a problem because rather than being useful it lures people into buying redundant technology such as the Apple Watch.

The Solution

Our solution to the problem is twofold:

1. We utilize the unintuitive step counter that is already in peoples’ pockets by making it easier to comprehend with a user friendly interface, and more accessible via smart notifications. No more clumsy fitness gimmicks for the people!
2. Humans are competitive by nature. Research in exercise science shows that humans are willing to perform at a significantly higher level in any activity when in a group setting. By introducing what we call “friendly competition”, we utilize our natural winning instinct to make people strive to become first on the leader-board by simply walking more! The “friendly” aspect lowers the entry barrier and makes it more interesting, compared to competing against strangers. This element of gamification makes the app a go-to place to make sure you’re not slacking and giving your friends a chance to tease you.

Introducing Stepaholic:

On-boarding

Our aim is to make on-boarding so simple that anyone could do it while taking a walk. Type your name, password and phone number; confirm your mobile device and invite competitors straight from the phone book. You’re all set and ready to step it up!

Easy to use. Even on the go

The competition starts as soon as your first team is set up. Steps are counted and updated real-time, making it easy to compare, compete and taunt your friends who are slacking behind. The more steps you take, the higher up on the “pedestal” your avatar is placed. We designed a gesture based navigation system, making the app easy to navigate while on the go.

Swipe left to view team history, i.e. a summary of each competitor’s total amount of wins and steps taken.

Swipe down to see the board of this month’s winners. Continue swiping down to view the current month’s history.

And the winner is

Each group of competitors needs to agree what hours to compete on. At the end of a day, each competitor receives the daily results via a push notification. The winner of the day is crowned and celebrated with a silly but encouraging confetti animation. Hurray! Equally important, the worst performers of the day receives a randomized, provocative emoji next to their portrait to spur their competitive nature.

We’re 3drops, a digital product studio based in Stockholm. Enjoyed our publication? Please hit the green ”Recommend” button below so others might stumble upon this case. Scroll further down and follow 3drops to stay tuned.

Are you interested in bringing your own idea to life? Just reach out and say Hi!

3drops on the web

3drops on Dribbble

3drops on Facebook

3drops on Twitter

Stepaholic 👟 was originally published in 3drops Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We love to challenge the status quo at 3drops. When we stumble upon an interesting idea we sometimes spend around one week on articulating and prototyping our vision.

Distractions are everywhere. If you use your computer for work, chances are you spend a big chunk of your time in tabs and apps that don’t help you get your work done. What if we could build fun a tool that helps you stay focused?

The Problem

Access to immediate distractions since the advent of the internet has made it more difficult than ever for people to stay focused and entertainment is always available just one click away. With so much choice and variety, even non-procrastinators have begun straying to the dark side. According to experts, technology has grown so fast that it challenges our cognitive control system at its very core.

Procrastination plagues most people at some point in life and as many as 20% of people are chronic procrastinators. This inability to effectively manage time has a negative impact on our lives and a common denominator is our need for instant gratification coupled with aversion of difficult tasks. Essentially, we prefer to spend our time on Facebook and Youtube watching cat pictures because it makes us happy, even though forgoing to complete the overdue TPS reports and answering those important emails will make us more stressed in the long run.

The unwanted side effects of procrastination is stress that spills over into our free time. The less we achieve in a work day, the more we worry about it while not working. As work piles on and our task lists grow, the likelihood of delaying work grows even larger and the negative feedback loop is set in motion. Can it be fixed?

Workplay

Saying “just do it” to a procrastinator is like saying “cheer up” to a depressed person. In order to put an end to procrastination, we need to understand where and how we spend our time while working. Are we really as efficient (or inefficient) as we think and which apps and websites are the biggest offenders?

Workplay is designed to to help people:

• Understand how and where they spend their time while working
• Identify which apps and websites distract them the most
• Break bad habits by limiting access to those distractions
• Regain focus on what they want to accomplish during work hours
• Improve their well being and reach Zen

Onboarding

We designed the onboarding process to be as simple and painless as possible. Questions are asked one at a time along with fun animations that hint at the nature of the questions. We created a playful experience while getting all the necessary information to demonstrate the value of the app to the user, without relying on long, boring and overwhelming forms. Efficiency 1, Procrastination Monster 0.

Maintaining a healthy balance between work and play involves limiting the amount of hours worked per day. Users therefore begin by setting up their work day length. Since users probably have an idea of which apps and websites they should spend less time in, they have the option to limit their access right from the onboarding screen.

Once Workplay has been configured it goes out of the way and lives in the menu bar. Users can easily switch between Work mode and Play mode and the app keeps track of the time left in a work day to encourage users to complete their goals every day. Time spent in apps can be monitored in real time and limits can be adjusted accordingly.

We’re 3drops, a digital product studio based in Stockholm. Enjoyed our publication? Please hit the green ”Recommend” button below so others might stumble upon this case. Scroll further down and follow 3drops to stay tuned.

Are you interested in bringing your own idea to life? Just reach out and say Hi!

3drops on the web

3drops on Dribbble

3drops on Facebook

3drops on Twitter

Solving Procrastination with Workplay was originally published in 3drops Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We love to challenge the status quo at 3drops. When we stumble upon an interesting idea we sometimes spend around one week on articulating and prototyping our vision.

Assumptions

• What if instead of finding a ticket, a ticket found you?
• What if researching airline tickets was so easy you could do it in your sleep?
• What if you could find inspiration to visit new destinations, without having to plan your trip at a traditional brick and mortar travel agency?

A lot has changed in the flight ticket industry over the last 10 years. Not too long ago, buying a ticket typically began at a brick and mortar travel agency and was associated with layers of service fees stacking up on top of the ticket price. It was also a time consuming and tedious process that involved driving to the city center and standing in line at multiple travel agencies, just to get an idea of how much a flight ticket should cost.

Today the majority of ticket purchases take place on the Internet. According to market research institution GfK, 90% of travel bookings in 2014 involved going online. Airlines still sell the majority of tickets, but finding and comparing them now takes place on third-party ticket search engines that offer flights from thousands of suppliers globally.

This means great news for all travelers and bad news for the flight ticket industry since higher competition means lower profit margins, which translates to cheaper tickets for the end-consumer. Yay! But with all this availability and literally thousands of options to sort through, searching for and finding the right tickets has become a time-consuming and tedious process. Again! In fact, a study conducted by GfK shows that the average online ticket purchaser visits 22 websites before committing to a purchase, and disregarding if the purchaser buys the ticket online or offline they will have spent nearly 3.5 hours researching online.

Our solution

Introducing Bounce! In order to make finding and purchasing flight tickets less tedious, we flipped flight ticket search on its head. Instead of you finding tickets, tickets find you. Our solution to the problem is an iOS app that is both fun and simple to use. Rather than forcing travelers to actively search for cheap tickets, the app asks you three fundamental questions. These are:

1. Where are you going?
2. When do you want to go?
3. What is your budget?

By simply taking a travelers budget into the equation, Bounce will already provide you with more on-point results than you would find by navigating over to many of the conventional search engines. Our API and your smart devices push notifications work in tandem to provide you with tickets that always fit within your budget and timing. Without you having to spend valuable time doing research.

On-boarding

We wanted to create a focused on-boarding flow since conventional ticket search engines centers more around upselling than providing a great user experience. By using playful language and separating the on-boarding into several screens with easy-to-answer questions as the only action, we guide the users into the app in a delightful way.

Result

As soon as you have completed the on boarding; lay back, relax and let the app get to work for you. You will receive a notification whenever a ticket appears that fits your preferences. Your ticket preferences can easily be adjusted by simply navigating over to the ticket settings.

Additional perks of using Bounce

• Goodbye, Cookie monster: Search engines use sneaky cookies to analyse our urge to purchase. In practice, it means that the more times you repeat your online searches for a certain date or destination, the higher the prices will become.
• Farewell spammy upsells: We cut away all the unnecessary clutter such as hotel bookings and car rentals and simply focus on providing our users with the most on point flight tickets.
• Notifications–For the people!: We’ll keep you in sync with the cheapest ticket prices by querying retailers at low-demand times of the day. Buying a ticket at 3am on a Tuesday morning is cheaper than buying at 2pm on a Sunday. Why? Because supply and demand controls the price on all products and services, hence, the lower the demand at a given time the lower the price. With bounce, we’ll feed you high demand tickets at low demand hours of the day.
• Buy the ticket, take the ride: For all you globetrotters and dare devils, Bounce suggests tickets to any destination within your price and time frame. Just select “Bounce anywhere” and you’ll find inspiration to take on your next adventure all day, every day.

We’re 3drops, a digital product studio based in Stockholm. Enjoyed our publication? Please hit the green ”Recommend” button below so others might stumble upon this case. Scroll further down and follow 3drops to stay tuned.

Are you interested in bringing your own idea to life? Just reach out and say Hi!

3drops on the web

3drops on Dribbble

3drops on Facebook

3drops on Twitter

Rethinking the flight ticket industry ✈️ was originally published in 3drops Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.