Ashtray, a smoke-free iOS app
Tobacco is one of the main avoidable causes of disease and premature death in the entire world. In order for you to be aware, in Portugal on the year of 2016, tobacco was responsible for 10,6% of the deaths! Personally, and talking based on my own experience, when smokers want to stop the addiction, usually it’s because of 1 out of 2 scenarios:
• The scare — We’ve went to the doctor, he told us that we really need to stop smoking;
• The aware — We understand how bad tobacco is, and we want to cut the bond.
So what am I proposing?
The problem that I’m trying to solve is how to help people quit smoking the easiest way possible by providing a personal assistant that interacts with the former smoker and helps him avoid things that would activate the trigger. Let me give you an example: For me, having lunch and grabbing a coffee was a huge trigger for a cigarette. The first time I’ve tried to stop smoking, I stopped taking coffee with sugar, and that helped me a lot in order to avoid the trigger.
Whats the gains?
The gains are huge, because we are talking about topics like: Reducing heart and lung diseases, Reducing breath symptoms likes cuffing and/or lack of air. It also allows us to save money that we would use to buy cigarettes and lighters.
Also, it allows people to be more informed about the challenge of quitting to smoke. What today is extremely difficult, can become a little bit more easy with the right information.
Last but not least, It’s important to understand that the topic of tobacco has a lot to do with the culture of each country.
In Portugal for example is extremely common to see people smoking, and you even have zones where you can see 10 years old kids smoking (in specific days, because their village is having a holiday). We don’t feel pressured by society to stop smoking. We can’t say the same about other countries: In London, in order to buy tobacco, I had to go to a small store and ask the guy behind the counter for a pack of cigarettes. The cigarettes were behind him, on a “secret compartment”, and the packs don’t have any kind of design whatsoever, the only difference between the packages is the brand name, otherwise they would all look the same. The way people speak about tobacco in London, gave me the clear impression that smoking is not well seen by the citizens.
Why is this solution different from any other?
We don’t really have an app with all this information. We have apps that will notify us about the struggle that we’re having, the money saved and the health improvements but we don’t have an app that interacts with us on a daily basis. We are not talking about Push Notifications but the general experience of the app with the user. Is the app happy? How would the app react when the user craved and smoked a cigarette — Would it take it easy or would the app criticise the user?
Also, these stop smoking apps only gives you advices regarding the data you insert, but there are not able to advise you on how to stop smoking. Exercise and eat healthy are excellent ways to reduce the craving. By having an app that evolves this two topics, we can involve these user in a completely different experience.
People tend to tell me that stop smoking can become easier when we have a friend that stops at the same time. So why shouldn’t the app be THAT friend?
The Ashtray App
The app has four main screens: Home, Timeline, Achievements and Settings.
Let’s start by the home: The focus of this view is showing you when you smoked your last cigarette and show the cigarettes smoked, the cravings, the exercise and the healthy food that you had so far on your current day. Now imagine that you just had a run and you want to add it to the app — you just need to tap the “Add” icon on the right top corner, and you will open a modal that will allow you to select one of the four options displayed at the end of the screen.
The process of adding an event is extremely simple. As you can see on this example, I’m about to register an Craving event. This event will be associated with the current time and day, and we are able to see it documented on our Timeline.
The timeline allows us to have a clear perception of what’s been happening in my life regarding to the smoking subject. We can see the same four types of events displayed on the Timeline.
Now, what can be better than having proof of your effort? I would like to have an app that could give me the idea of gamification, in order to make Achievements more engaging and more fun. You can get an Achievement based on your non-smoking record, craving, exercise and by eating healthy food — This way, I’ll try to make an extra effort to keep myself motivated with my goal.
Final Considerations
2020 was, without a doubt, a extremely difficult year. Still, not everything is bad. Although this project never saw the light of the day, I was still able to stop smoking on July 20th. This time has been much more easy, compared to my previous tries, and for a long time now I don’t feel the need of smoking.
Have a great 2021.
