Building in public: understanding our users' needs

|

December 13, 2024

As part of our user engagement, we undertook a survey to understand what brings people to our product. Here we investigate the findings.

Stay Connected with Air Aware Labs

Stay connected with Air Aware Labs and follow our journey toward cleaner air. If this article sparked your interest, feel free to reach out!

Send us mail on

More Articles

Health
Dr Will Hicks
June 10, 2026

High blood pressure: how air pollution combines with this silent killer

Air pollution can affect more than just your lungs. Constant exposure and inhalation of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been linked to an increased risk of high blood pressure, also known as hypertension. High blood pressure is often referred to as the “silent killer” because it rarely causes noticeable symptoms, yet it can severely damage the cardiovascular system.

General
Louise Thomas
June 8, 2026

Vote for us in the Reset Connect 365 competition

We have the opportunity to win £10k at Reset Connect on 24 June

Media coverage
Louise Thomas
June 8, 2026

CEO appears on the CEO Uncensored Podcast

In this episode of The Chief Uncensored, host Paul Essery talks with Louise Thomas, CEO and Co-Founder of Air Aware Labs

Building in public: understanding our users' needs

As part of our user engagement, we undertook a survey to understand what brings people to our product. Here we investigate the findings.

Louise Thomas
December 13, 2024

At Air Aware Labs we hugely value our users and want to understand their goals and needs as deeply as we can. We are building in the market for personalised environmental health, and we are only starting to scratch the surface of the opportunity for impact.

We are now on our third round of user research and engagement. Before we launched our Strava integration in April, we learnt from our elite athletes' panel and from engaging with over 60 families. Then in the build up to our AirTrack launch, we interviewed users extensively, then created a panel for in depth user testing.

En route to AirTrack mobile app

Now we have kicked off our preparations for a mobile app, we have entered another round of deep engagement. Before we even have a beta to test, we are making sure we understand:

  • our current users' goals and needs through interviews and surveys;
  • the likely shape of our future user base through market research.

Here we dive into our emerging findings from the latter process.

The results are in...

We surveyed 212 people to understand their levels of knowledge and concern about air pollution, what might be driving that concern and their willingness to download and potentially pay for an app. The results were fascinating:

  • while knowledge of air pollution was balanced, 83% expressed concern about it - this follows a similar pattern to our first ever survey
  • we didn't target the survey on people with health conditions, but 40% responded that they or a loved one had asthma
  • the groups most likely to engage with our air quality proposition were those who already use health and fitness apps
  • no surprises that cyclists and runners were particularly keen to engage with a fully featured AQ tracking app
  • there were only small differences between genders, age groups and even people with health conditions when it came to interest in an app (a bigger survey might tell us more)

Alongside our engagement with current users, this is giving us a wealth of understanding to help us build a product that people need and love. We can't wait for the new year when we start to test out the app!