New Interaction for a Washing Machine

Everyday appliances should bring joy and independence, yet disabilities—permanent or temporary—often create barriers. With 1 in 6 people worldwide living with a disability, accessibility is a universal need. We involved our design team in empathy exercises, letting them experience these challenges firsthand and ground their design decisions in real human needs.

My role

Timing

The project

After interviewing people with disabilities and comparing their experiences with our products, I designed and led a workshop where our designers immersed themselves in using our appliances while facing similar challenges.

Year: 2024

What is the reason for“My Wash” App?

How might we enhance our understanding and build trust while effectively taking care of our clothes? From complex control panel to a more comprehensive interactions.

Understand Phase: Discovering Real Needs

Provisional & revised persona
Face to face interviews

5 interviews of 20 minutes have been conducted with participant fitting the persona. The aim of these interviews was to define and understand how people are using their washing machine today, and what they would expect when it come to “fabric care” :

On site Observations

The washing ceremony is made of numerous steps. From sorting the clothes up to hanging the wet clothes. The washing part is actually only a small part of it. Looking at differents people in their home, I have gather observations about the most important steps of the washing procesS.

Making sense

Create Phase:
Designing the Experience

Site map & User flows

List all the pages needed to be addressed. Envision the various ways that the user could move though and interact with their app and the washing machine

Low & Mid fidelity wireframe

In Sketch, creation of Low, Mid and High fidelity wireframes which have been used in the different iterations of the app.

Iteration #1

Iteration #2

Prototype & Test

Face to face testing.

The app has been tested 3 times (3 successive iterations) with 5 participants each time. For each test, 2 simple tasks have been asked : “Check the different programs, and run a “daily refresh” program. “And “You have a SweatShirt to wash”. What is the best program to use?

Iterations of “My Programs”

Iterations of “Landing Page”

A very efficient User Flow

Prototype

TheHigh Fidelity prototype is a functional Interaction mock-up.

Prototype

TheHigh Fidelity prototype is a functional Interaction mock-up.

Impact & Outcomes

A validated concept

The differents Usability tests do validate the efficiency of the washing app. People understand how to engage programs without having to input classic temperature and spinning speed.

This appliance control needs to live within the full ecosystem of appliances. The next step would be to integrate to a more complex environment, and carry a similar interaction language to the other appliances.

What to improve