Water Budgets for EyeOnWater

Project Overview

EyeOnWater is the customer-facing application from Badger Meter, designed to give homeowners real-time visibility into their water usage and proactive leak alerts. Our users are customers of water utilities who want to understand their consumption but haven't always had the tools to do so. The app puts that data directly in their hands, providing them with insights into how they use their water.

Water Targets is a completely new feature within EyeOnWater that gives users the ability to set a personal water target and track their progress toward it over time. Rather than simply observing how much water they use, users can now define how much they want to use, turning passive data into an active conservation goal.

This project originated as a utility-imposed model, where utilities would set water targets for their customers, but evolved into a user-driven one, giving homeowners full agency over their own conservation efforts. The project has been ongoing since 2023, progressing through multiple rounds of iteration based on feedback from product, as well as business needs.

What needed to change?

Users could see how much water they were using, but had no way to define how much they wanted to use. Without a target to measure against, the data was informative but not actionable. For utilities facing periods of mandated conservation, this gap was especially pronounced as there was no mechanism in the product to support or encourage water conservation at the user level.

• User needHomeowners who cared about conservation had no way to set a personal goal within the app. They could monitor their usage, but couldn't establish a target to work toward, track their progress, or feel a sense of ownership over their efforts.
• Business needUtilities needed a way to support water conservation efforts through the product, particularly during times when reduced consumption was a priority (e.g. during droughts). The original direction was utility-imposed targets, but the model shifted to user-driven goals to encourage voluntary participation in conservation.

Defining success

Success for this feature meant more than having the user fill out a form, it meant creating an experience that motivated users to engage with their water usage in a new way.

Here is how I defined the goals:

Finding direction

Because Water Targets was a completely new feature, I started from scratch with a moodboard. Rather than jumping straight into flows, I wanted to first establish the visual and emotional tone of the experience. Water conservation is a topic that can easily feel guilt-inducing or overly technical, so the goal was to find a direction that felt encouraging, clear, and personal.

Here, I looked at different visual designs and UI that were rich in graphics in order to help me understand what kind of graphs to the users. I wanted to display information in an insightful and intuitive way in order to enable users to make sense of their data and where they stand in relation to their goals.

Shaping the design challenge

After research, I developed a set of "How Might We" questions to help frame the problem space before moving into solutions. This step was especially important on a project with shifting scope. The HMW questions helped anchor the team on what we were actually trying to solve for the user, independent of how the feature was being defined at the product level.

• How might we convey to users information about water targets?
• How might we let users know about their goals?
• How might we allow users to keep track of their progress?
• How might we encourage users to achieve their goal?
• How might we educate users of methods to reduce water usage?

Exploring possibilities

The ideation phase began with a broad question: what does it actually mean to give a user a "water target?” I explored different ideas, whether that be a quota to stay under, a goal to hit, a historical baseline to beat, and how each one implied a different experience.

A major inflection point in ideation was the pivot from the utility-imposed model to the user-driven one. In the original direction, utilities set the target and users were expected to comply, which would create a very different design problem from the one we ultimately solved, as well as removing the user’s autonomy. Once the direction shifted to user-created targets, the experience opened up. We needed our users to understand what to set, how to set it, and what it meant for their usage going forward.

From sketch to screen

I started with low-fidelity sketches, showing how a user discovers the feature, and how progress is communicated on the detail view. At this stage I was focused on structure and sequence, not visual design. Sketching allowed me to quickly test multiple layouts without getting attached to any one direction.

Here, I was able to really explore and create a layout that would carry onto future iterations. Information is being explicitly sectioned out and each component has its own card design. Users will see information about the target for the meter they are viewing, an explanation of their goal, helpful visuals, and lastly a section for users to reference for any water saving tips.

Mid-fidelity brought the structure into Figma, where I could test layouts against the existing design system and gather feedback from product and engineering. Self serve water targets were not yet a part of this iteration.

I was able to map out some more ideas in a lower stakes environment, as it’s much easier to make design iterations at this phase of the design. It was in this stage that things were starting to take shape and come together.

High-fidelity designs applied the full EyeOnWater visual language to the refined scope. This phase involved several significant pivots, most notably around scope. The feature had begun as a broad conservation dashboard concept, and through ongoing reviews it was refined down to two core surfaces: a creation form and a details view.

Key decisions at this stage included how to present the creation form that felt guided without being overwhelming, and how to visualize usage on the details view that was immediately readable.

The finished experience

The final design centers on two core surfaces: the water target creation form, and the detail view page that becomes the user's landing page for tracking their conservation progress.

The creation form is intentionally simple. Users select the meter they want to set a target for, define their usage goal, and confirm. The form is designed to be easy to start, easy to complete, and easy to revisit.

As you can see, the form design had undergone another makeover before landing in its final state. The guiding principle throughout was simplicity, as we wanted to make sure creating a water target felt effortless. That meant making deliberate decisions about what to leave out.

Two features were scoped out during the process. The first was a comparison feature, which would have shown users how their reductional goal stacked up against their historical usages. While useful in theory, it added complexity to the creation experience that risked overwhelming users before they'd even set their first goal. The second was the ability to choose a custom start date for the target (whether that be the first of the month or on Sunday of each week), a feature that was deprioritized due to engineering constraints and timeline. Both removals were the right call for MVP, as a form that asks less gets completed more.

The result is a focused creation experience. Users define their target, with the ability to add optional start and end dates, confirm, and they're done. The form is already prefilled with a recommended goal that is a 10% reduction in their average usage, making it even easier to create a Water Target. The goal was to make the first step toward conservation feel as easy as possible, because the hardest part of any behavior change is getting started.

Once a target is created, the detail view gives users an at-a-glance read on how they're tracking, presenting their current usage against their goal in a way that feels motivating rather than punitive. Users can edit or remove their target from this view. The page is designed to be worth returning to, and useful enough that users have a reason to check in on their progress throughout a billing cycle.

The details view also evolved as the project neared completion. Several changes came in response to UI constraints introduced by Apple's liquid glass design language, which required us to rethink how certain visual elements were rendered. We had to remove the blue headers at the top of the screens because of some of the constraints with liquid glass, as the new design system was not working very well with the blue tint. Adapting the detail view to work within these constraints meant finding solutions that preserved clarity without fighting the system.

During this phase, we also removed water saving tips. The tips added extra information to a view that was meant to be scannable and action-oriented. It was thus not a priority for this feature, so removing them kept the focus on what matters most, which was how the user is tracking against their target.

In contrast, we added a section to the detail view to show how they are receiving alerts for their Water Target. This feature connects directly to a larger notification system being built across EyeOnWater, which supports feature-specific notifications. Alert contacts on Water Budgets is one of the first expressions of that system, and how it's designed here will inform how similar patterns are handled across other features in the app.

What changed?

Water Targets is an ongoing project that continues to iterate. The feature has moved through a full design cycle — from moodboard and HMW questions through low, mid, and high fidelity — and the core experience of user-created water targets is taking shape. What's most significant so far is the strategic pivot itself. We moved from a utility-imposed model to a user-driven one fundamentally changed what success looks like for this feature, and the design reflects that shift.

• Quantitative ImpactMetrics to be added once the feature launches, which will include water target adoption rate among active EyeOnWater users, engagement with the detail view, and any measurable change in usage patterns among users who set a target vs. those who don't.
• Qualitative ImpactThe shift to a user-driven model has been well-received internally, aligning the feature more closely with EyeOnWater's broader mission of giving homeowners agency over their water usage. It is also the first feature as a part of EyeOnWater’s “Premium” initiative, building a scalable foundation for the future features still to come.

What I learned

Designing Water Targets taught me something that's hard to learn on shorter projects, which is how to stay anchored to the user problem when everything else around it is shifting.

Scope changed. The product model changed. Priorities shifted.

Through all of it, the HMW questions and the early research work through sketching and moodboarding kept the team grounded in what we were actually trying to solve, giving users a meaningful way to participate in conservation.

Water Targets is part of our initiative to build an “EyeOnWater Premium” experience, which is a larger initiative designed to give users deeper, more personalized insight into their water usage through an expanding set of advanced features. As one of the first features under this umbrella, Water Targets helped establish what "premium" means in the context of EyeOnWater, as a platform to provide not just more data, but more agency.

The project is, at its core, an expression of a belief Badger Meter has held from the start — that every drop counts. Designing the tools that make that belief actionable for everyday users is what Water Targets and the broader EyeOnWater application is set out to do, and what it continues to work toward.