A leading UK bathroom manufacturer were looking to completely redesign their current digital shower app ahead of the launch of their latest flagship product line.
- User research
- Prototyping
- UI design
The current app didn’t have many regular users, was plagued with usability issues and wasn’t compatible with the technology built into the new showers.
To design an app that becomes part of the customer's daily routine which in turn increases user retention and repeat usage.
We were initially approached with part-complete wireframes which the client wasn’t very happy with. Before diving headfirst into amendments or design, we needed to take a step back and understand if the current solution was really solving the user’s needs.
I conducted interviews to understand more about people’s daily routines and how the product could assist and encourage regular engagement. After speaking to users we observed some interesting patterns
The interviews helped us to understand what features to prioritise and also directly influenced the development cycles. For example, understanding that the vast majority of participants owned a smart home system led us to prioritise voice commands functionality in the subsequent releases. Additionally, usage statistics were not initially considered, however, when it was discovered that over half of participants were interested in their usage, we factored this into our feature roadmap.
With the learnings from the interviews, I created prototypes of key flows to test and validate our findings.
Overall the core flow and functionality of the prototype received a very positive response. The tests revealed sticking points and usability issues, although the beauty of a code-less prototype is that we can update and amend the designs rapidly without causing lengthy code rework.
The majority of users were more interested in the remote bath fill option so this led us to prioritise this over the showering function. We also introduced a bottom navigation bar as we observed some participants struggling to navigate to certain areas of the app.
Half of the participants missed the suggested presets at the bottom of the screen, so we opted to use a toggle tab to ensure that this content wasn’t lost out of scroll view.
“I don’t know how hot 38 degrees actually is''. Three of five participants struggled to put temperature and flow rate into personal context. To remedy this we added a colour range temperature bar with average and eco tags.
I worked closely with the app developers to create a design system so that the user interface was consistent for both the development team and the end users.
An emphasis was placed on animation as it was important to give clear visual feedback to keep the user informed of their progress. As well as the practical use of the animations, we were conscious to try and imitate the physical process and create a moment of delight which left a positive impression with users and encouraged them to return.
Animation by the very talented Max Beard
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