GoFire

GoFire’s primary product interfaces with an iOS device via Bluetooth. The device itself is pretty robust, and handles a large array of customizability for the user on a screenless hardware device. The iOS app would act as the interface, displaying temperature, strand, cannabinoid and terpene profile, device battery life, dosage remaining, and other important stats for the user. The product experience is vast, with features like feedback, usage, stats, and so much more. Given such a behemoth of an app, I started by consolidating the information hierarchy into something digestible.

This first iteration used a card-system to represent the unique cartridges and strands you could use. THC vs CBD content is a vital relationship in the experience that defines how someone will react to a given strand, so I put the two stats front-and-center below the title of the strand. I put the battery life of the product and how much substance was left at the top given that those were the two stats I assumed would fluctuate pretty quickly during a typical use period and would guide the availability of usage. I made the top-to-bottom hierarchy from least-controllable to most-controllable, with the most active temperature control at the base of the screen, closer to the thumb.

There were a couple of issues with this iteration. First, the ratio of THC to CBD was not well articulated from the base milligram count. When a user would load a new substance, there wasn’t a good visual indicator as to how the substance is different from the previous one. Second, the temperature control didn’t indicate any point of progress for the product's preparation of the substance and didn’t offer feedback to the user on their temperature selection. Finally, GoFire wanted to incorporate “reasons for dosing” to collect data on how or why the user is dosing at that time. The hue of the color indicators began to take a role as both a key brand element and a utilitarian element, as the spectrum demonstrated at what point in the process the user would be. Purple stood for negative or cautious situations, blue was neutral, and green was positive.

Let’s start from the top. I put the product battery life into an icon, the strand name into the title, and an info label-button in the nav bar to relieve a large amount of real estate in the center of the screen for the primary dial. Tag-buttons above the dial are an easy way for a user to select their reasons for dosing or medicating, providing the necessary data capture that GoFire is looking for. The primary dial displays a visual indicator of the THC and CBD ratio for this particular strand. In the center of the dial is the current temperature, dosage size, and number of dosing sessions left with a particular substance. At the base of the dial is a temperature indicator that bubbles-up from the temperature selector, and then reveals a gradient dosing indicator ring around the primary dial. The glowing diamond at the top of the dial indicates the rate that the user is inhaling through the product and transitions from turquoise in the center to purple at the base when a user isn’t inhaling optimally.

GoFire was really excited about these designs, but still had a couple of fine points of detail to correct. Having the percentage of THC and CBD in a strand didn’t help the user discern much about the profile of the strand they had, so I changed the percentages to labels in the lower corners of the dial. The temperature selector didn’t articulate the degree incrementation of the device, and GoFire wanted to have a warning for when the temperature would cause the cannabis to combust. I tried a couple of temperature selector styles and decided to go with large numbers and five-degree increments to keep things cleaner.

All of the refinements along the iterations relied on continuous feedback from the hardware team, as one primary feature implied the complete removal of the incremental temperature selector in the center of the screen. The hardware team had repurposed a button on the device to enable the user to toggle between three preset temperatures settings: a low, medium, and high temperature. That meant that incremental changes would only be necessary for communicating the preset temperatures, so I tucked that away in a secondary interaction. To edit the temperature, a user could either tap the “Edit” button in the upper right, or tap and hold on one of the temperature circles. An animation would slide the temperatures into a row and reveal the selector, and tapping away from the bubbles or “Done” in the upper corner would return the screen to the original position.

Another huge adjustment came from the adjusting the frequency of editing “reasons for dosing” or tags. The original plan was to make editing tags a medium-frequency task, but the founders wanted to up the ease of editing tags and refine them down to just three primaries for quick access in the event of swapping cartridges in-and-out of the device quickly. A swipe-up card solution at the lower portion of the screen made for an ultra fast method of accessing and editing tags, and once a user was in the tag search screen, navigation was a breeze. A user could swipe side-to-side to quickly access recent, health, or lifestyle tags, and if swiping around didn’t get the job done, they could always default to searching for a specific tag. The robustness of this solution ensured users were intentional about completing the tag selection, as gathering data on usage is a key part of the GoFire experience and business model. The use of Xs and arrow icons for quick tag importing prioritized the user’s customization as well as speed to completion. The Spotify application was a huge influence on this final iteration, as it showed how intentional and direct copywriting can guide the user through a flow to establish a habit of use, and that small type is perfectly appropriate for creating whitespace and a lightweight experience.

It’s unsurprising that the original logo for GoFire was hexagonal and sharp, as the hexagon was (and still is) a pretty popular reference to the “new recreational science” of the cannabis industry. I chose the soft logotype for its cleanliness and friendliness, and three diamonds as an accent on the upper right of the logo to symbolize the vaporizing product that the company produces, and counter-balance the descender of the lowercase g. Finally, I used a soft color palette of turquoise/green, blue, and purple for the brand to differentiate it from stereotypical companies in the cannabis industry that use fairly extreme hues of green.