Monitair
Real-Time IAQ Monitoring
for Buildings
[UI & UX Design]
TEAM
Amrita Sakhrani & Shira Miasnik
TIMELINE
6 months
ROLE
UI Design Lead & UX Designer (Branding, Interactive high-fidelity prototype, and the UI components for both iOS & Android).
CHALLENGE
Businesses fear about the health and safety of their occupants in buildings given the heightened fear of enclosed spaces since the beginning of the pandemic. As a leader in the IAQ field, we wanted to help provide the means to allow buildings to track the health of their indoor air.
SOLUTION
Led the interface design for an enterprise IoT mobile application, translating real-time hardware sensor data into actionable insights for B2B customers.
IMPACT
Reduced engineering effort by 20% by rationalising UI components and optimising cross-platform design to adapt the iOS app efficiently for Android. Successfully onboarded 3 educational institutions for pilot programmes
Researching the Indoor Air Quality Ecosystem
Domain research to understand indoor air quality metrics, pollution sources, and how building managers monitor air quality performance against sustainability targets.
Sources of indoor air pollutants: Oil, gas, coal, wood, tobacco products, products for cleaning & maintainenance, central heating and cooling systems, humidification devices, outdoor sources radon, pesticides, outdoor pollution.
Understanding AQI: Yardstick that runs from 0 to 500. The higher the value the greater the air pollution and greater the health concern. EPA establishes 5 major pollutants.
Highlight: Managers keep a close eye on reports to see a building’s performance against sustainability targets.
Learning from Industry Practitioners
Informal conversations with facilities and engineering professionals revealed key pain points in tracking and reporting indoor air quality across buildings.
We had a booth at the Build For Asia Expo, 2020. I was able to visit other booths and have casual conversations with the public to understand their take on monitoring IAQ.
Attendees: Property Managers, Engineers, Engineering Consultants, Building Management
Defining Primary User Groups
Two key user groups emerged—property executives overseeing multiple buildings and on-site managers responsible for daily operations.
Property Executive
"I want to know we are meeting the required standards"
- Off-site
- Managing Multiple Properties
On-Site Manager
"I want to know if occupants are safe in my facility"
- On-site
- Handling day to day tasks for a single property
Analysing Competitor Reviews
Examined app store reviews from leading IAQ products to identify recurring user frustrations and opportunities to improve monitoring and data insights.
Key insights
- Poor connectivity / Connection Inconsistency
- Lag time due to Bluetooth
- Wifi enabled would be faster
- Graphs are not useful > No time on charts
- Feature needs improvement, not easily able to scroll back in time
- No landscape option for tablet
Opportunity areas
- Introducing a map/floorplan feature for facilitie
- Seeing how the score is affected when un-checking certain paramters
- Ios 14 widget showing score across rooms (e.g. like weather widget)
- Highlighting spikes on charts > making it easier to detect
- Easier way to compare numbers back in time? (But would the average user do this? Seems they just want to know current stats)
Shaping the Product’s Visual Language
Developed moodboards and visual references to guide a design system that made complex environmental data feel clear, calm, and approachable.
How could we create a visual aesthetic to ensure technical data was amiable?
Finding the sweet spot between scientific and delightful.
As a part of the UX and Branding we were searching for a factor of delight and pleasure when using an otherwise technical application. We did a brainstorm and mood board sessions together to try and gather inspiration for how to create this throughout the app’s interface. Some of the inspiration came from the delight experienced in Headspace through the soft gradients and illustrations.
Exploring Visual Directions for IAQ
Indoor Air Quality is a relatively new product category with few established design patterns. Starting from the product’s existing plant-based brand motif, I explored over 30 visual concepts to communicate IAQ in a way that felt both scientific and approachable.
Shortlisted directions included:
- Plants responding to IAQ levels
- Air molecules changing density
- A productive occupant in healthy air
- A working fan
- Abstract circular visualisations
Rapid Prototyping for V1
Built a high-fidelity prototype using Material Design components and mapped the product’s information architecture to enable faster development.
Design iterations for faster issue detection
Refined the map interface to help users quickly detect zones with poor air quality and access detailed IAQ metrics.The colored green zone showed more over-powering leaving us to a blue highlight across & colored pins for status communication.
Design System & Style Guide created
High-Fidelity Interactive Prototype
Authentication flow & error handling
Created and tested the full login and password recovery journey with structured error messaging and user guidance.
Refelection
It has been a great learning experience being the lead UI and working through selecting and creating all components for the design system. I've learned to think about:
- Scalabilility as more metrics become available by sensors
- UX writing when creating filters and sort options for better clarity
- Utilizing components from design libararies for lower cost development and pre-existing scalability
- Thinking about design options and modals for iOS vs Android
- The impact of color in feedback design
Selected Works
