CleanPlay: A Journey Creating Their Brand, Website, & UI/UX For Android Tablet

During the first couple of meetings and emails, my goal was to understand and get a grasp of what I had to work with. I asked questions about their target market, competitors they admire, branding materials, what platforms would they be developing for, and many other questions. I also researched some of their competitors and gathered notes about the products they sold, the industries they were targeting, and the copy they were using throughout their resources, websites, downloadable PDFs, and such. I was keeping an eye on the terminology, certifications, and claims competitors were making to see if CleanPlay was in a similar space or if we were going to market something completely new.

Competitor and Product Research

Additionally, because of my background as a dental assistant, I remembered that clinics have machines that are used for sterilizing dental equipment. After struggling to remember the names of the many machines, I stopped by the autoclaves (steam, dry heat, and gas autoclaves) to see how their user interfaces and user experience appeared. I was looking for elements whose functions appeared essential because they kept reappearing across different screens and brands. I noticed the following about these machines (old and new):

Older models had knobs to dial timers, and temperatures, and adjust other settings (Could Provide Haptic Feedback)

• ‘On’ or ‘off’ switches. On newer models, red and green buttons for ‘start’ and ‘stop’
• Levers or handles to ensure machines are locked
• Newer machines had physical buttons with LED's on the side to show different selections
• Buttons with images on them and words below to depict sterilization package sizes or other important information
• Warning labels on exterior advising the surfaces were extremely hot when in use

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There is only so much information you can get from a picture or video, but after analyzing CleanPlay’s competitor's products I noticed the following about some (not all):

• Used ONE button to begin the disinfecting process
• Provided hard buttons, with very little screen real estate, very analog (like an old bedroom clock)
• LED’s or small bulb (red, green, or blue) to distinguish when a process was running or complete
• Implemented a fail-safe button on the inside of the machines (if they were large enough to fit an adult human)
• There were chemicals or liquids that had to be replenished and filters that needed to be replaced (price points at about 30$for filter with a need to replace every six months.)

At this point I didn’t have any colors, typography, logos, or taglines so I went straight to work on the branding. It took about a week or so to come up with sketches and rough drafts of logos and color palettes that I kept communicating with the team. Eventually, we created an anonymous poll and the majority of votes went to the one they have now! Unfortunately, I did not create an official branding guideline for them because at the moment my priorities were on creating and finalizing the UI/UX for the android tablets minimum viable product.

Overall, I feel grateful for the research, discovery, and iteration processes we took. Unfortunately, because I was a one media team for this project, it was a huge challenge to find the headspace and time to implement user surveys, interviews, or user testing with potential clients (like daycare owners, teachers, etc.) I devoted time to looking to their competitors to see what worked for them, as that became a sort of roadmap to our first MVP. Getting that one-to-one feedback from our engineers, Dev team, and stakeholders was what helped push the product in the right direction.