Unica: Clean app

Interaction design

What if the user can’t read? A simple app for cleaners indicating which rooms require their attention. With as few words as possible. One of my favourite projects for I hate reading.

Intelligent built environment powered by Unica Innovation Center means we:

  • gather data from sensors (meters, human feedback, weather data, DBs, etc) in built environment (buildings, parkings, bins, benches, whatever),
  • analyze it with united force of AI and human experts,
  • gathers insights and
  • create various products
which help building managers (owners, occupants, visitors) make the facility more efficient, sustainable and comfortable.

Goal: match between system and the real world. Intelligent built environment invites to excercise this usability heuristic: I want maps, floor plans and building sections. Of course, involving actual architectural plans is often (or rather most of the times) impossible, and the whole 'cartoon-ish' look is derived from a decision to use a non-proportional yet an image of a building.

How so users cannot read? The product is developed for employees of Dutch cleaning companies. Some of them are refugees who doesn’t yet speak Dutch and may not have a device translating apps on the fly. I had some fun filling first prototypes (see below) with Cyrillic text to see if my team will figure what is what.

Home page and menu

A proof of concept for future use. User profiles and statistics are not yet, implementes so there's no need in the menu (screen 1). The map (screens 2-3) is prepared for the moment when many buildings serviced by the same cleaning company are connected to the system.

Currently 2-5 buildings per company are involved and presented as a list (screen 4).

Building icons were intended as placeholders for photos, and I regret making them already: so far all clients want a cartoonish image of their buildings too.

Building view

There are 3 states of a room based on occupancy data: to be cleaned, to be checked whether it needs cleaning, and clean ones. I hope you can figure what is what :)

First 3 screens show common case (3 floors), borderline case for the given viewport (5 floors) and overflow case. In this viewport a building higer than 6 floors will need scrolling. The low-rise construction prevails in the The Netherlands so we do not pay much attention to skyscrapers. In fact, current cases do not exceed 3 floors.

There's a composition sacrifice: more sky would be nice (i.e. placing the building lower) but I expect more humble screen size than used for mockups (frames mimic Galaxy S10).

Tips and service screens

A.k.a. 'the glory of IKEA doesn't let me sleep'. Well, trying to be language-independent you can't avoid cartoons.

Prototypes