I was contracted by three founders with a passion for indoor air quality. They taught me about the dangers of scented candles, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's), and the dangerous health effects of poor indoor air quality. They brought experience across chemical engineering, hardware development, and marketing. My role was to develop the brand identity and app experience for the sensor.
To create an app we first needed to establish the design systems to be used across the app, website, and advertising materials. I developed the name for this brand, messaging, slogans, brand positioning, strategy, and visual identity guidelines. Our objective with this brand was to communicate fresh, clean and natural.
Upon completion of the brand systems, we began research and design for the app. To get a jumpstart we were able to review direct competitor apps. These competitors offered inspiration for UX journeys, although our app would include a lot of additional features. We then developed user personas based on our brand archetypes to establish shared empathy for our audience. By establishing key user objectives we were able to create user journey maps of the various features and functionalities needed. These were roughly visualized into wireframe sketches.
We learned from reviews on popular competitor apps that many people rarely engaged with their apps after purchasing and setting up the app. Most users were only opening the app when they had rare alerts for poor air quality situations (burnt dinner or VOC-heavy candles). We wanted to add unique features that would allow us to send non-intrusive notifications and improve value to our users.
Based on our brand archetypes, we developed a persona of our prime user. This persona was used as a reference throughout design to establish deeper empathy with our users.
A map of the users’ experience with the brand and app from initial awareness to long-term loyal relationship.
Upon finding clarity of the user journeys and general layouts from wireframe sketching — I designed final high-fidelity user interfaces using Figma.
The dashboard was designed to make it easy to quickly view data collected from multiple sensors, with various metrics, and over various intervals of time — while offering a main navigation to quickly begin browsing products or articles.
A navigation menu at the bottom of the home page makes it easy to drift into shopping for new products o improve revenue. This navigation menu also helps improve engagement by funneling users into the "Learn" section to read news and articles.
Robust features for sensitivity for notifications across various metrics put the user in control of their indoor air — and increase user engagement.
Key Learning
