Cleen

Improving quality and hygiene in public spaces

We’ll be honest here. Building an app that enables you to review washrooms was never front-of-mind at Subism before this project came along. However, once our client HSG had explained the project to us we were more than intrigued by the challenge.

HSG is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of washroom hygiene products, with customers including restaurant chains, venues, office blocks, educational establishments and more. With a mission to improve quality and efficiency in public toilets, the company wanted to develop an app enabling users to review and rate facilities they’d used.

Subism was briefed to design and develop the app, its identity, and a range of promotional material to encourage people to use it. Behind all of that, HSG wanted to use the reviews people wrote to help inform clients of where and when toilet facilities needed cleaning and servicing. Here’s where the app would truly benefit our client by helping them identify business opportunities.

Our approach

Striking the right balance between humour and hygiene

In terms of its UI and navigation system, the app had to be crystal clear and easy to use. As we developed it, we created branding which would include both icons to represent various sections of the app and drive the review process. Illustrated characters introduce an element of fun to the app, though there is no hint of toilet humour.

There was certainly an emphasis on clean design, which shines through in the white, blue and green colour scheme, and in the use of space and line work. However, we didn’t want it to feel too sanitised and there is a little playful humour here and there, such as a nose with a peg on it to indicate a bad smell.

We developed the Cleen app using Node JS and Vue JS sitting on the Amazon S3 cloud platform for data storage. It’s a solution offering scalability and robust performance.

Making a difference

Working with the HSG team

Hygeine is a global, multi-billion pound industry, and the business factor behind this app was crucial. Yes, HSG wanted it to look great and offer a great user experience, but it also had to deliver on the company’s objectives.

We were in close communication with HSG throughout the project, and conducted numerous brainstorming sessions with their teams. The purpose was to explore ways that the company, its clients and washroom service providers would be able to access data from Cleen. For Subism it was important to gain a complete understanding of the requirements at each level and implement them. Based on these meetings we devised a dashboard and notification system that would handle all the complex data coming in, but would be easy to use by stakeholders at different levels.

Subism supported HSG by bringing ideas to the table during each phase of development, and identifying potential problems and solving them along the way.