Water is running short in urban homes, but greywater reuse is built for owners, plumbing work, high cost, no feedback. Renters are left out.
A renter-friendly greywater unit, and a four-screen app that turns it into something you can read at a glance: state, control, savings, alerts.
I started from the thing renters can’t do: change the pipes. So I priced what the market already sells, interviewed people renting in four cities, and designed to the two things they all asked for, no plumbing work, and a number on screen that proves it is working.
An eco-conscious professional renting an apartment with her partner. She wants to live sustainably but finds most water-saving systems too complex or too costly for a rental.
“I want to reuse water at home, but everything I’ve found seems too complicated.”
Zara needs a simple, cost-effective way to recycle greywater at home.
The whole product had to be readable in the seconds someone gives a utility app. Wireframes fixed the hierarchy before any colour went in.
Because the hardware already existed, this had to be a monitoring and control app before anything else. One blue, white type, pill labels, every number sits in its own tinted card so status reads without hunting.
Splash hands off to Home once; after that the tab bar is the whole navigation. Every tab reaches every other tab, so there is no back button and no dead end.
The app accompanies Hydracycle's product design, a floor-standing greywater unit sized to slot into a rental laundry space, no structural work. Both halves were part of my undergrad thesis.
Usability testing sent me back twice, the operation mode toggle and the savings figures both had to get plainer before people trusted them. What shipped reads 38% of household water replaced, in litres, on the screen you land on.
Next: a scheduling layer so the system runs on the household's own rhythm, not a fixed cycle.
