Case: Brastemp BRY59
Promotional video detailing the product features.
Since I had joined Whirlpool mid 2016 I was dealing mostly with an ongoing project that had started way before I came in. It was a complete revamp of the 60 and 70cm platforms in Brazil, including both top and bottom mounts.
The BRY59 was a fairly inovative and competitive project for our regional market. It's the first regional 3-compartment bottom mount in Brazil. While it shares several components with the 70cm, it is definately the gem of the crown of the whole line up with it's dedicated control for the center drawer.
The drawer
In this compartment, the user has the ability to set up 4 different configurations (Cold beer, Ready-to-cut meat, Dairy and ham, Wine and sparkling wine.
All of this came out of extensive UX user research and Marketing consumer research, supported by cooling engineering.
The User Interface
The task was then clear: Manage to fit all the standard controls of dual-compartment refrigerator in the same capacitive touch PCB as the dedicated drawer controls.
This PCB was fairly new to everybody in the project, yet we were commited to push it's cababilites to the limit and ended up learning a lot about it as we went throught our explorations. Since it uses a touch film, it meant that touch-wise we weren't restricted to the PCB area itself: buttons could be placed outside of the PCB perimeter.
The first graphic proposal was meant to attend exactly what Marketing required, bearing in mind the technical limitations. Needless to say it wasn't exactly par with the project sleekness:
First UI proposal, based on marketing requests.
Despite a lot of resistance from the project team, I did manage to present another proposal, focussing on the user experience (working hand in hand with the UX, HMI and CAD team). It was worth it. There were several technical aspects that played part in the second version:
Second UI proposal.
End result
Final, working UI.
By now, marketing had set up for the final wording. And as a side note, every slight change to the layout meant double-triple checking it with the CAD designers. We couldn't afford to make proposals that weren't technically feasable. It ended up enriching experience to someone who until then had only media and resolution size as concern.
