Scout ES200

Designing and building a novel electrostatic disinfectant sprayer and companion app for iOS and Android

Company

Lighthouse EIP is an industry leader in Environmental Infection Prevention. Lighthouse offers a suite of infection prevention technologies and programs to ensure that all facilities – whether a hospital, research lab, office park or a baseball park – are 100% clean and safe amidst any environmental circumstances.

Role

The main scope of my responsibilities involved designing and shipping MVPs for new technologies spanning both hardware and software. This process involved every stage of the product design process, including user and market research, persona ideation, low and high fidelity design, wireframing, prototyping, and user testing.

Timeline + Tools

2020 - 2022

Figma, Whimsical, Pivotal Tracker, React Native, Sketch, Miro, Adobe Creative Suite, Wordpress, HTML/CSS

Skills

Research, varying fidelity visual design, wireframing, collaborating with remote engineering team, prototyping, validation testing, marketing collateral design, packaging design, branding

The Problem 💣

Among countless other lessons learned over the course of the pandemic, COVID exposed many existing infection prevention solutions as generally ineffective and highly inefficient. Where traditional cleaning and disinfecting methods once sufficed, a new and improved solution was required to dramatically reduce the spread of harmful pathogens and bacteria – a high efficiency, touchless disinfection system. Moreover, this system had to effectively address large, high-traffic environments such as airports, cafeterias, stadiums, gyms, movie theaters, schools, etc.

One solution that people quickly turned to was electrostatic disinfection. While the potential for success was certainly there, existing electrostatic sprayers on the market lacked in durability and reliability. Poor design and hasty go-to-market strategies resulted in vast amounts of downtime; sprayers sitting on shelves, waiting for repair.

Additionally, facilities suffered from a lack of organized disinfecting protocols, data, and analytics, which made it virtually impossible to effectively verify regulatory compliance set by the EPA, WHO, CDC, and other governing organizations.

The Opportunity 🙏

Scout ES200 is the world’s first smart electrostatic backpack sprayer – a complete solution to disinfect large areas effectively, efficiently, and reliably.

Powered by Scout Connect, Scout empowers its operators to capture, report, and leverage key disinfection data to achieve regulatory compliance and optimize the efficiency and efficacy of infection prevention programs across a variety of industries and facilities.

Scout aims to disrupt the electrostatic market by focussing on three core pillars: efficiency, reliability, and performance. Let’s dive in!

Final Designs and Results

Scout ES200 isn’t just another electrostatic backpack sprayer – it’s the complete solution for tailored infection prevention protocols to achieve total safety and regulatory compliance.

So… How Did We Get Here?

While the demand for portable electrostatic disinfectant sprayers was omnipresent, our user research identified a demand for a highly efficient and more reliable sprayer that would help facilities meet compliance guidelines.

Note: Admittedly, the user research and testing periods were not as robust as I would have liked since COVID limited our exposure to facilities and our ability to travel and interact with clients. Classic story, I know.

Nonetheless, we conducted extensive market research to identify gaps and flaws in existing systems. Paired with our user research, we discovered that existing systems lacked in the durability and reliability departments. While they seemed to be effective at addressing large areas, they broke down frequently which resulted in prolonged periods of downtime and costly repairs. 

During the research period, we also learned that regulatory compliance was a big concern for facilities. Not only did facility management want to instill confidence in their patrons when they reopened their doors, but they also needed to meet certain regulatory guidelines, especially in the case of healthcare and research facilities. Without proper data capture and reporting capabilities, facilities and regulators were largely left in the dark in terms of what concrete steps had been taken by environmental services departments to clean and disinfect.

Lastly, we approached this project through the lens of complete infection prevention, meaning that electrostatic disinfection is only one facet of the complete solution. More often than not, a combination of cleaning and disinfecting methods is necessary to address varying facility environments, particularly when dealing with COVID.

Quick Note

There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’ll just focus on the bits and pieces that I think will help you learn the most about my design process and the “why” of the project. After all, that’s what you came here for, right?

Spray Wand Interface Design

Designing the sprayer wand and “cockpit” interface was a lot of fun and presented some complexity and constraints. We learned that competitive wands lacked features that our customers considered valuable, such as electrostatic ON/OFF toggle and trigger lock ON/OFF toggle. 

I intentionally designed the cockpit UI to be very simple. I considered cockpit and dashboard designs across a variety products and found that in many cases, less is more. Take a standard car dashboard for example – when indicator lights cover the dashboard, it can be distracting and overwhelming. I can see there’s a problem, but how do I fix it? 

The V1 cockpit UI design included only four components: trigger lock toggle, electrostatic voltmeter (ESV) toggle, bluetooth low energy (BLE) toggle, and battery indicators. I employed the law of proximity to group elements with their indicator LEDs.

We made a number of findings during the first round of validation testing that informed the V2 redesign of the cockpit interface. We discovered that BLE toggle was unnecessary for two reasons: first, we never want operators to turn BLE off since doing so would disable automatic data capture, and second, BLE draws very little energy from the battery, so there is really no need to turn it off. 

I replaced the BLE toggle with a laser aiming guide toggle. The laser aiming guide serves two primary functions: to illuminate the target spray path, and to identify optimal spray distance from the target surface. The optimal spray distance is achieved when the laser aiming grid measures about two feet wide, or the width of the operator’s shoulders. Spraying at the optimal distance results in superior droplet deposition, which helps users maximize both surface coverage and surface dwell times, in turn helping users achieve regulatory compliance. Additionally, appropriate spraying behavior helps users maximize the efficiency of their chemistry output, in turn helping users save time and money. Since Scout is a novel product, I tried implementing subtle instructional features like this whenever possible.

Perhaps the most important discovery, however, was that the metal casing for the trigger lock button could harbor electrostatic buildup and (very rarely, but sometimes) shock the operator. At only 6.8kV particle charge, the electrical shock was by no means dangerous to the operator, but we decided to remove the risk altogether by adding a thin rubber membrane over all the buttons.

Designing the Software

Moving on! To build out Scout Connect, our companion software platform for Scout, we worked iteratively to write, design, build, and revise the features and framework of the mobile/web app. Our team consisted of myself, a PM, and a remote engineering team located in Australia and India. I worked with the PM to write user stories and acceptance criteria for each of the desired features (using an amazing project management tool called Pivotal Tracker), I then designed mid-fidelity wireframes for each of the features (I like Whimsical for wireframing), and handed it all off the the engineering team (they used React Native Paper components to build the app). We worked in this cycle for most of the project.

It’s important to note here that our goal for this portion of the project was to ship a working MVP of the companion app as quickly as possible – curating high fidelity designs and a robust design system was not a priority.

I worked within the React Native framework to design style elements to help guide the engineering team. My goal for the style elements was to convey a sense of trust, efficacy, and professionalism to the end user, so I explored a navy blue color palette. The style elements were inspired by comparative products in the cleaning and disinfecting industry where many existing and successful brand identities revolve around light/dark contrasting colors (eg. Clorox, Mr. Clean, Ecolab, etc.)

V1 Wireframes

Before jumping into wireframes, I always like to lay out flowcharts of the user experience from a very high level. I use colors and shapes to identify the starting point for the user, the desired outcomes and goals, and the potential unintended outcomes. Below is an example flowchart for the error notification and resolution features.

Our V1 feature set aimed at empowering users to identify and resolve issues, capture and report data from their spray routes, and complete preventative maintenance (rinse cycles) to ensure optimal performance and durability of their sprayer over time.

The V1 designs were largely informed by our belief that reliability and accountability/proof-of-service would be the most valuable features for our users since these aligned directly with maximizing uptime and achieving regulatory compliance.

The two main takeaways from V1 validation testing were:

1. Our existing designs relied too heavily on text. We learned that many of our end users spoke and read English in a very limited capacity, oftentimes as a second, or even third language.

2. The data capture and reporting flow caused too much friction for the end user. Asking users to actively be on their phones while conducting a route was a bad idea for a number of reasons, mainly because it distracted them from the vital task at hand – disinfecting their environment.

This was an important lesson for me. Unlike my previous experiences in UX/UI design, I learned that sometimes it’s best to drive users away from their phones. Who would’ve thought!

V2 Wireframes

Our V2 wireframes focussed on simplifying the task flow and reducing the amount of friction the end user experiences when conducting a route. I prioritized limited phone interaction and greater reliance on visual communication.

Validation testing proved that our new designs were more intuitive to non-native English speakers and ultimately reduced the user’s phone interaction during their route.

However, these designs still lacked a few key features on the supervisor’s side, including assigned routes. We learned that ES teams and regulators can require very specific tasks and methods that need to be completed in order to effectively clean and disinfect. Our V3 wireframes aimed to accommodate a use case where supervisors can create and assign routes for their team members to complete. This offered an opportunity to gamify the user experience and allow operators to have a bit of fun!

V3 Wireframes

To support the supervisor’s capabilities, we needed to design an entirely new experience catered to a different persona. This part of the project presented a high level of complexity and involved a wide variety of UX/UI design skills, including dashboard design, information hierarchy, responsive design across tablets and web, and interaction design. In essence, we were designing and building an entirely separate, yet complementary product.

The new designs focussed on accountability and proof of service to help facility management achieve regulatory compliance.

More Screens and Deliverables

In addition to the features I’ve showcased thus far, we also designed a whole fleet of additional features aimed at providing efficiency, reliability, and performance.

There’s too much to cover here in just a few paragraphs, so please ask me about anything that sparks your interest.

I also designed all of Scout’s sales and marketing collateral, including a landing page, product brochure, user manual, FAQ sheet, tech specs sheet, and customer warranty. Felt nice to flex my visual design muscles!

Other Deliverables

In addition to designing the actual sprayer and its companion app, I was responsible for designing Scout’s on-unit branding and its packaging. Both projects were a ton of fun and involved a few of my favorite things: collaboration, obstacles, and pixels 🤓

Unit Branding

Packaging Design

Takeaways

It’s difficult to wrap up over a year’s worth of work into a couple sentences… but alas, storytelling is one of the skills that separates good designers from great designers, so here goes!

One of the most prevalent and reoccurring themes throughout the entire process was the concept of constraints and limitations. As a fully remote team, all of our meetings and discussions happened over Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Outlook (I’m team Gmail, for the record). Plus, our engineering team was based out of Australia, so throw a 12-hour time difference into the mix. Furthermore, competition in the electrostatic market meant that patents and trademarks guided many of our opportunities for innovation. Oh, and just for the sake of buzzwords… did I mention the supply chain?

However, even more prevalent than the limitations we faced were the obstacles we overcame. At the end of the day, we were able to produce a truly novel, highly competitive product that’s not only posed to reshape the cleaning and disinfecting industry at large, but it may also save a few lives along the way. Plus, it works! The physical construction of the unit, the way it fits comfortably on your back, the spray profile, the droplet deposition, the connectivity with the companion app – everything turned out to be really impressive in the final articles.

I know I’m not the first person to say, “It’s really cool to see your project come to life,” but… it really is.