Sun Effects Booth App for Queensland Health

The Background

This app is dated now, but we wanted to include it because it was genuinely groundbreaking at the time. Projects like this don’t come along too often! Queensland Health needed to shift sun protection behaviour in 12 to 24 year olds, a demographic with a well-documented tendency to think tanning looks good. The brief was to develop an iPhone app that would challenge that belief and change behaviour. Mettro was brought in from the start, working with the Queensland Government across early concept development, strategy, design, technical development, and target-market testing.

The Challenge

Telling young people that tanning is dangerous rarely works. The audience already knew the health message. What they didn’t have was a personal, visual reason to care. Any effective solution had to meet them on their own terms, on vanity and appearance and how they wanted to look, rather than lead with statistics or warnings.

Our Approach

Mettro’s answer was to show users exactly what sun damage would do to their face over time. The app used photo augmentation tools to simulate the ageing effects of prolonged sun exposure on the user’s own skin. Seeing the impact on your own face is a different experience from reading about UV damage in a brochure.

The team took a user-first approach throughout, keeping the design clean and the experience intuitive. At the time of launch, Sun Effects Booth was the only app on the market designed specifically to engage and educate the community on sun protection, rather than serve a commercial or entertainment purpose. Mettro’s UX design and app development work was built around that purpose from the ground up.

The Outcome

The app was well received by Queensland Health, who noted the intuitiveness of the experience and the clarity of the design. Sun Effects Booth was named a finalist in the AIMIA Awards for Mobile Marketing and Advertising.