Project - Dyson CleanTrace™

Disclaimer: This case study concerns protected IP. All views related are my own and may not necessarily reflect those of Dyson.

Team

1 - supported by the New Product Innovation team

Timeframe

Not disclosed

Tools

Figma, AfterEffects

My Role

Experience Design

What is CleanTrace™?

Dyson CleanTrace™ is a bold statement by Dyson to build upon its strategy of Evidencing The Clean through the use of new technology and experiences.

I defined the vision for interaction between phone, machine, and Augmented Reality (AR) overlay of a cleaning session to make sure users never miss a spot again.

What's the Social Good angle?

Every UXer's dream - Gamifying an experience from a chore to an adventure--!
Anything I can do to help alleviate the burden of housework & improve home health.

My Opportunities:

To establish Dyson's AR identity.
No vacuum has gone here before, so what's it going to look like?
To explore behaviour nudging - showing users how to maximise efficiency & runtime.
To bolster the feature set of the MyDyson app to complement & extend machine ownership.

Introduction

With the advancements in mobile phone Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities and the developing positioning of the MyDyson™ app, I had the opportunity to explore more bespoke features that could capitalise on both.

The tools available at the beginning of the project included the ability for systems to recognise visual elements within the phone's camera viewport.

I was inspired by the dust map report visual created by Dyson's robots.

Persona Non Cleaner

Let's say the FloorCare persona we use is a 'diligent cleaner'. They care about cleaning the floor, not just the high traffic areas.

But the thing about diligent cleaners is they're also diligently cleaning everywhere - and everything - else. Especially when deep cleaning!

In some early prop trialling on the testing course, more than half of test participants claimed they'd vacuumed the whole area they'd intended to and were shown in the prototype to have missed some of these areas.

Evidencing the Clean

But what good is a map of the floor when I don't know how clean it is?

With each iteration of its flagship machines, Dyson has explored new ways to prove that it's doing what it says it will.

For the Gen5detect, this means the Dust Detect function shows on the screen the dust pickup with bars that fill up, and shows a clean state when the bars go back down.

Together with CleanTrace, users have never been more sure of a thorough clean.

A video of the way the Gen5detect responds to dust via its piezo sensor near the cleanerhead better demonstrates the concert of changing motor sounds and screens.

At the link you can see how the motor ramps down again when the dust levels are lower:

My Design Focus:

I want to reassure the user they've cleaned in the way they intend to by complementing Dyson's existing Floorcare technologies with a simple visual flair that establishes its presence in a bold new sphere.

AR-ranging the Flow

This is the first quick iteration of the app interaction experience to see how it might fit within the MyDyson app environment. It was hard to show physical motion with non-app elements, so I just slid them around with smart animate to show intent.

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Remember our 'diligent cleaners'?
It was during another round of trialling that one of the most diligent cleaners took the phone from its cradle mid-clean and viewed their environment - an organic discovery!

The software enabled this continuity and didn't break the experience.

I now had to explore a way to demonstrate it to a higher fidelity, which led me to...

Soft-where?

I had my screen assets, I had myself, and I had some phones.

In the absence of access to AR prototyping software, I overlaid the screens to a sequence I filmed and put it together on AfterEffects, showing the interactions at each step.

To define how the Experience should be governed & translated for implementation, throughout the process I drew up a living doc of Experience Requirements with the latest flows, changes and rationale as we went along.

This was shared again on each weekly call with wider Product, Project, Design, App, Cloud, Engineering and Software teams in the UK and Singapore to ensure the developing interaction methodology was preserved.

Dyson Demo

Ably helped by a world-class videography production team, I was pleased to see just how much of my intent remained in the short Dyson made to promote the CleanTrace product:

Final Thoughts

Future Features:

Lots of these, in a Roadmap - I wish I could tell you!

To be candid, I loved how this project really split users down the middle. Some would dismiss it, and then not know where they'd cleaned, and others would chase me down the hallways asking me when it would come out.

For an affordable value proposition to indicate the wider potential of digital-devices to aid in manual tasks, it shows a lot of promise and is a credit to the company for daring to develop it.

Many thanks to Dyson for the opportunity to develop the experience, and I'm just glad it took less than 5,127 prototypes.

Dyson CleanTrace™ is currently released in USA and Germany.

"Working with Tom was a pleasure throughout our time together. He provided designs that felt heavily refined and made implementation of the UI easy and efficient. By including detail on animations, transitions and intended user behaviours throughout the flow the design intention was clear and easy to capture in the app's implementation.

Tom was first in line to help mitigate sticking points and ensured that we had everything we needed to complete our required work packages. His availability for conversations, open approach to discussions and ability to create high fidelity designs was second to none.

- Software Implementation Lead

"In several reviews I've noticed Tom considering unusual and unexpected ideas and solutions. I'd always encourage this 'open-minded' thinking to problem solving and user experience. Question the status quo and look for innovative alternatives.

I've found Tom to be clear and considered in his presentation approach. He's clearly thought about the product and the experience at a good level and is able to clearly consider the complexity of different interactions and how they fit into someone's daily life."

- VP of Design

Dyson CleanTrace™