ScentAir

As a scent marketing company is bracing itself to explore new markets, I helped them to build an app for their devices to provide a meaningful user experience to their clients.

Overview

ScentAir is a scent marketing company that provides scent marketing products to businesses and helps them turn passive customers into active customers by providing them meaningful on-site experience. They are looking for an app that would provide a seamless experience to their customers.

I adopted design thinking approach for this project to give it a direction and processed a full in-house implementation to reduce risk and uncertainty.

I worked as the designer of this app to audit, research, ideate, design, and prototype the product.

My Role

UX/UI Designer

UX Research (UX Audit, User Research, Heuristic
Analysis, Use Cases, Competitive Analysis);

Ideating (User Stories, Sketching);

Rapid Prototyping (User Flow, Wireframes, Hi-fi
Prototypes);

Testing (Guerrilla Testing, Usability Testing);

What are we challenged with?
ScentAir are entering the domestic market by providing devices for households. We partnered with ScentAir to help them develop an app that is user-friendly and is able to reflect on the vast set of functionality these devices offer.

What's causing this problem?
While ScentAir has successfully served its clients in the commercial sector, the same approach will not be beneficial when targeting domestic users. They provide in-house services to their business clients that include setting up the devices, but this contact will be minimal for the home product clients. Hence, the app needs to be intuitive and should be able to provide a pleasant experience.

Frustrations:

Scheduling
Navigation
Connection
Information
Organizing

UX Audit of Existing app

I went through each screen of the existing app and conducted an UX audit to lookup design flaws in the existing design. I performed a heuristic analysis to understand the design from user's perspective. All these screens were then compiled in a document along with the context where these screens are used, what are the problems with those screens and the recommendations to solve the problem.

UX Audit screens, context and recommendations

Pain points in the initial research

User Research Insights

The primary points of friction identified were

Provide a better way to showcase the complex functionality of the device.
Make the user experience delightful.
Simplify the controls for home product owners.

Key Challenges

What are the controls and how do these controls affect the device?
How to present the controls to the user in a way that is easily accessible?
How to introduce the features to users that they haven’t had seen before (scent blindness)?
How can these features be reflected across different devices?
How to make users familiar with the system which they don’t know what to expect from it?

Error State

My Solution

Some features and functionality were dropped to reduce cognitive load on the users.
The original design has labels that indicate device components whose functionality is difficult for users to understand, so I used more intuitive labels to explain functionality.
The play and pause feature that were originally in the controls page were brought on the device list page to make it more accessible.
Visual feedbacks were utilized to provide users device state update.

Presenting the best options to the user so that he/ she could get the best out of his/ her device and set ambiance that suites their preference.
I applied the user-centered design approach and developed the product based on user requirements.

User Flow

It is the visual representation of a specific route that the user would have to take, to achieve the goal. User flows helped me to keep the project on track when the design was being prototyped.
The Red routes i.e. the critical user flows are displayed in the images below.

Ideation

We narrow down the target audience and their expectations by our in-depth user, market, and product research. This provided the initial knowledge needed to deliver an impactful experience.
After we defined the core functionalities that we needed to include in our solution, we designed a low-fidelity prototype that helped us conduct usability testing. This allowed us to gather some crucial feedback to help us decide what to include in the final experience before jumping into the next iteration of our design.

Controls Design Concept

Conceptual UI options

Finalized design

Guerrilla usability testing

Five participants were randomly selected to perform the guerrilla testing, and the Marvel app helped me in turning the sketches into an interactive wire flow.

They were able to understand the purpose of the app, and some of them were excited to see the final product.

I discovered some features that weren't overt to the users, and also a few flaws in the design which I worked to amend in the next step.

Marvel app guerrilla testing

Wireframes

The wireframe is a visual representation of a user interface that helped me to determine how elements would be
placed on the page without being distracted by the use of colors, graphics, or typography.

Adobe XD Wireframes

Usability Testing

The goal of this test was to find out if the user could perform the designated tasks such as scheduling an event, controlling the device, changing the lighting, pausing the schedules with ease.

Most users were able to schedule the event and were able to control the device. Problems were found in the understanding of the controls.

The results and the problems found out from the usability tests were analyzed for designing a newer version of the prototype.

Issues and changes according usability testing

Redesigning

User Experience designing is an iterative process, and that's what came across while performing this project. Although users were able to finish most of the tasks, on deeper exploring it was found that they didn't have the understanding of how those controls are affecting the devices.

By reworking the insights, I created a new interface that has favorableremarks.

Add new device

Existing devices

Fig: Empty state and devices list screen

Old Controls

Fig: Error states and hamburger menu showing locations list

Schedule settings

Error State

New Controls

Side Menu Drawer

Fig: Original design vs Redesigned schedule and controls screen

Error State

Fig: Off-On state of logo light button

Fig: Schedules Paused and Running states

ScentAir Mock-ups

Learnings:

Scent Marketing: Working on this project helped me learn more about the whole different realm of customer experience. Even learning about the phenomenon of scent blindness and how infrequent vs consistent smell affect our perception was fascinating for me.

Shared Interface: Designing for multiple devices with different features and for different environments helped me understand how to create an experience within the same app that is catered for those specific devices.

ScentAir Final Prototype

ScentAir

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