AquaCare | A Speculative Aquarium Maintenance Dashboard
OVERVIEWDesigning a speculative aquarium maintenance dashboard to take out the stressors in the fish-keeping hobby
This case study describes a six-week visual design project conducted as part of the University of Maryland’s Visual Design Studio class. Aside from being a school project, fish-keeping is a passion of mine. I could sit at my aquarium for hours watching the fish swim, and I have found that it can be a great stress reliever from everyday life. However, with such beauty comes many factors to keep a well-maintained fish tank.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
Six weeks
Skills
Product Design
Visual Design
Design Systems
Animation
PROBLEMWhat problems were addressed?
Controlling individual aquarium components
Every aquarium has multiple pieces of equipment that function independently, such as automated feeders, heaters/thermometers, and lights. Unfortunately, controlling these tools requires aquarists to adjust each component spread throughout the fish tank, creating needless effort.
Distinguishing fish tank health
A vital aspect of a healthy aquarium is excellent water quality. Frequent water testing is essential, but distinguishing PPM (parts per million) readings and filter media health is challenging.
SOLUTIONPROJECT GOALS
01
Create a dashboard system that displays essential aquarium information.
02
Design at least one novel feature that would benefit aquarists in maintaining a healthy aquarium.
03
Develop visually appealing and intuitive controls allowing aquarists to perform tasks on their fish tanks.
Brainstorming
Inspiration
Before starting my initial designs, I brainstormed how such an interface for my fish tank would look. I drew inspiration from digital signage, where people can learn about something they are looking at. And since I wanted to have all the information and controls in one place, what better way than a dashboard interface?
The Interface
I envisioned this dashboard interface stationed next to an aquarium. Therefore, the device I chose to host this dashboard was a tablet interface. Tablets provide a great blend of functionality and form and a larger screen size, which was perfect for this project. For reference, I created all my designs on an 11” Apple iPad Pro.
Initial Designs & Animations
Dashboard Design and Controls
My initial designs were completed digitally and centered around establishing the dashboard layout, colors, and readings and implementing animations for the controls. I knew such an interface would get a lot of interaction, so I spent a lot of time focusing on animations that were easy to use/understand and visually appealing.
Critique Session
Throughout this process, I received design critiques from my peers. I presented my interface during the critique session and answered questions about design choices and elements. The feedback I received from my peers centered around white spacing within the cards, colors, and the sizing of elements.
Design System
Colors
Overall, I wanted to use colors with blue tones to give a clean look and represent the aquarium fish-keeping hobby. Therefore, these were the primary colors I used throughout my interface, but I also used accent colors naturally found in aquariums to support further my goal of tailoring towards fish keepers.
Typography
I used the Montserrat and Source Sans Pro font families with different sizing and weights to support my objective of creating a clean interface. As an interactive interface, I also wanted it to be fun, so I used the Comfortaa font family to portray this.
The full design system used for this project can be found here: Design System
Final Designs
Main Dashboard
The main dashboard is where all the magic happens. The dashboard has tank controls for temperature and lighting. Also, there are pop-ups for feeding and media health controls. Under the four cards, there is a water quality section displaying the readings from the tank. If the reading were to reach an unsafe level for the fish, the reading would turn red and have an action-required tag. Behind each card would be an action plan for the fish keeper to take to reduce levels of the particular reading.
On the right side of the dashboard is a calendar where the user can add events to keep their aquarium in good health.
Live View
In the live view, users would have the ability to see their fish from inside the fish tank. Something speculative that I wanted to implement was the health status of fish in the fish tank. All pet owners want their pets to be as healthy as possible, and knowing when fish are sick is one of the hardest to diagnose, so I devised a method to display if a particular fish was ill or not for the fish keeper to take action.
Stocking
On the stacking page, I wanted this to act as a place for people to add the various animals/plants in their fish aquarium. A problem I had (and still have from time to time) with fish keeping was knowing the proper care for all the animals/plants in my tank. To address this, each card displays the basic care for each species of fish/plant.
The full design file can be found here: Design File
Proposed Next Steps
01
Perform UX research with aquarists to uncover any issues with the interface.
02
Update the fish tank animation to be more refined and visually appealing.
03
Expand on the stocking page and implement a care guide system for fish and plants.