Boveda Mobile App — Chris Karls

Boveda mobile app

Boveda’s revolutionary humidity management system

Overview

Boveda is the global leader in two-way humidity control packs for preserving humidity sensitive products like cigars, cannabis and guitars. For cigar lovers, a humidor is the best way to keep your cigars fresh and lasting longer. The problem, keeping cigars properly humidified was a tough job. Since 1997 Boveda has been the global leader in 2-way humidity control with their patent packaging fixed relative humidity (RH) packs.

With Boveda’s innovative spirit, they wanted to make humidor maintenance even easier. By creating a mobile app, in combination with a smart digital hydrometer sensor, they could pioneer a total humidity management system for their customers.

My Role
Lead UX Designer

Responsibilities
Product Strategy, Prototyping, Design User Flows, Visual Design, Interaction Design

Tools and Methods
Sketch, InVision

The Problem

Humidor maintenance is tough and laborious to keep cigars at peak freshness

For cigar lovers, a humidor is the best way to keep your cigars fresh and lasting longer. The problem, keeping cigars properly humidified was a tough job. Every time you open the humidor to check on your cigars or various products you impact the relative humidity (RH). There are also weather implications or seasonal changes throughout the year that make RH levels hard to predict. To top it all off, customers have a hard time measuring when their Boveda RH packs will need to be replaced.

The Goal

Design and develop a mobile app to pioneer a revolutionary humidity management system

The Boveda Butler, in conjunction with a digital hydrometer, monitors your humidor and its prized contents and then sends humidity, temperature and impact alerts directly to the Boveda app on your smartphone. No need to even open the humidor. Ultimately, this will allow customers to maintain peak freshness for a variety of products, analyze seasonal changes and data, as well as auto-ship or order new Boveda packs when RH levels are not sufficient for peak freshness.

Research

User interviews

I worked closely with the product and sales teams to grasp the overall requirements and project goals for designing and developing the Boveda Butler app though a series of meetings and interviews. This included understanding the technical possibilities of the Boveda Smart Sensor, a Bluetooth-powered device that tracks the temperature and humidity levels inside of your humidor and transmits the data directly to your smartphone.

It was clear that there were several themes that would make the Boveda Butler app project a success:

Intuitive app that would allow users to set-up the digital hydrometer sensor
Push notifications to send alerts to the user when a humidor falls outside of its desired range
Container setup and management for a variety of products
Easy access to recorded temperature and humidity level data inside of your humidor
Smart commerce features that allow users to easily purchase Boveda RH packs

Key findings

Based on the series of meetings and interviews, it was imperative that the Boveda Butler app needed the following MVP features to be successful:

Intuitive Onboarding
Provide an intuitive way for users to set up humidors (containers) within the app as well as syncing or pairing each Boveda sensor.

Push Notifications
The most important aspect of this product is the push notification feature that alerts the user when a humidor (container) falls outside of its desired range.

Humidity and Temperature Sensing Gauge
Sophisticated way to represent the overall RH and temperature level data that can be analyzed hourly, daily and monthly, so you can evaluate how conditions are altered throughout the day or as the seasons change.

Subscription - Replenish Boveda RH Packs
With powerful historical RH and seasonal data, Boveda can schedule Boveda RH pack replenish orders for users, allowing increased sales and ease of ordering for users.

Set up a container

Connect digital hydrometer with Boveda Butler app in under 1 minute

In order to monitor your humidor or any container, the app will ask a few questions about what product you’re storing, the desired RH level and finally sync the digital hydrometer specifically assigned to that container in under 1 minute.

Product Design

Prototype Screens