Defining a digital product and brand

Continuing the work and relationship that we have with Global Drugs Survey, our team were tasked with positioning, designing and developing the Drinks Meter brand and digital product. Drinks Meter is independently funded and provides anonymous, personalised feedback on your drinking.

Using our iterative digital process and approach, we crafted a visually-beautiful and user-focused digital product through a single, responsive codebase which users feel empowered to come back to.

Core brand creation

Pre-product, Drinks Meter needed to have a brand built that would best support digital use, but also provide flexibility in order to resonate with potential users across a range of environments including print advertising, digital PPC and physical collateral. We adopted a colour palette that offered vibrant tones – inspired by ‘urban nightlife’, balanced alongside a visual style that set the brand apart from other tradition medical and health tools.

The principle value behind Drinks Meter is a transparent, anonymous and open approach to feedback. The product’s sole aim it to better empower people to maintain awareness and monitoring of their alcohol use. We wanted to adopt a stylistic approach that emulated the clean, functional aspect of using Drinks Meter, but also provide a distinctively data-centric personality to the overall brand. Illustration played a pivotal role both within the product and also within brand activation.

Product technology

Our architectural planning for Drinks Meter was determined by both client and user needs. With appetite to have a single codebase and deploy the app natively across different digital stores and platforms including Apple and Android, whilst also maintaining a desktop web experience, we opted to work with a hybrid WebApp approach – wrapping our single product for deployment using Adobe’s PhoneGap.

The advantage of this approach meant that updates could be applied in one place and distributed across the device range quickly and easily.

Since launch, our architecture has expanded to accommodate unique localisations of the tool including offline data submission, localised content and other enriched features.

UI design

Simplistic and scientific, the UI approach that we created needed to best support our colour palette with a UI sensitivity that paired lightweight typography with thin line and stroke architecture. Reflecting a ‘neon like’ theme, the UI allowed for detail to be explored through subtle depth and detail within illustrations and iconography.

Results

Available on both the App Store and Google Play, as well as being a responsive site, Drinks Meter has received sterling praise from healthcare industry peers.

Since launch, Drinks Meter has:

• Been independently tested by health research analysts and awarded highest praise across an eSBI app review
• Received commendation by leading healthcare professional including Professor Paul Wallace, University College London: “It’s relevant, attractive, easy to use and provides useful feedback. In other words, it’s a great tool.”
• Supported over 35,000 people
• Helped users from over 170 countries worldwide
• The brand and product has also been extended to support greater commercial opportunities with new feature-sets released with support continuing.