The Vimar By-Clima app project was born at a time when the company and the entire home climate control market were still timidly trying to find their way in dealing with the great potential of digital interfaces. Devices were still designed to be fully configurable and controllable from their screens using buttons or other mechanical controls; the few digital interfaces did nothing but duplicate the same interaction logic on the smartphone screen.
21AM introduced, through By-Clima, a totally different approach: in a world where, sooner or later, physical interfaces would become increasingly less important compared to apps, it was necessary to speak a different, natively digital language. For the new app, 21AM introduced a new information hierarchy that clearly separates command actions from settings; the infrequent configuration change procedures are managed through guided processes rich in help information, eliminating the need for a manual. Since By-Clima was created to manage thermostats with completely different programming and communication technologies—namely Wi-Fi, SMS, and audio coding—making every aspect and function explicit was fundamental.
The distinctive element of the project, which later became part of Vimar's own visual language, was another: for this application, 21AM designed a new, radically digital method for the most complex operation, namely the time programming of the automatic mode. While other interfaces reproduced mechanical programming control tools, placing the hours on a horizontal axis and associating a temperature value to each by moving a vertical selector, By-Clima offered a purely visual tool.
Daily programming is represented by a complete ring, from 00:00 to 24:00 continuously, on which sectors of any width representing a time interval can be created; a color corresponding to a temperature can be assigned to each sector for immediate reading. In full touch interface style, sectors can be modified, moved, deleted, and merged; at the same time, the programming of one day, which appears as a miniature in the weekly view, can be dragged to another day to be copied.
The simplicity of representation and modification chosen for this feature made it immediately accessible, and the use of color codes much more understandable, so much so that it has become a cornerstone of Vimar's user interaction to this day.