Last year in March AUX Studio conceptualized and built an app as an experiment to inspire people of Cape Town to save water. They wanted to make it easy for residents to have access to the latest and most important information, but also to promote the idea of per-person-per-day usage by household. At the time this information was not readily available. They also wanted to test a simple gamification idea to see if it would inspire people to take action and share ideas.  

“At the time (March 2017) we felt like the drought and cape town water crisis was a great real-world problem to tackle. It seemed like rewarding and worthy problem to tackle with real social impact.”

Of course, client work got in the way during the course of 2017 and the project was put on ice. Then in November 2017 the studio decided it was still a worthwhile project and completed the first version. We officially trickled the link to social media on the 27th January.

Since then the app has been featured on Memeburn.com and has also been highlighted in both the Google PlayStore and the AppStore as a top app in the Free Education category last week. [Screenshots attached]

At the moment, only residents with CoCT billls can calculate their per-person-per-day usage using the app calculator, and then post that result to their suburb leaderboard. Some people have rightly pointed out that this excludes residents without a water bill. The developers has provided the following response to users in the app store:

“You’ve raised a great point here which we need to consider. We decided to release the product before it contained all the possible features we could build, otherwise we might never have launched at all, and we didn’t want that. We realise there are things that we have not conquered but we will get there as we gather feedback like this, learn and adapt. Plans to capture water usage in a different way are already underway.”

So far, the response has been great, and there are already hundreds of users who have posted their water use to the Cape Town leaderboard. Last week an update was released so that users per-person-per-day calculation is more visible and people can also navigate to their suburb. All users are created anonymously using a unique and creative naming system.

AUX a product design studio based in Cape Town. They work with established businesses and start-ups providing naming, identity design, ux design and rapid-prototyping.

Link to the TAPOFF app https://www.tapoff.co.za