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Intellipure Filter Reminder App
The Challenge
This project started while I was researching opportunities to increase replacement filter sales for Intellipure.
Replacing filters is an important part of maintaining an air purifier, but customers may not remember when they last changed a filter or know when their next replacement is due. For our internal team, understanding a customer's purifier and filter history could also require piecing together information from different orders and records.
I began thinking about how we could make this easier for both customers and our team.
What if customers had one place where they could manage their purifiers, track filter changes and orders, manage subscriptions, and know exactly when their next filter was due?
After developing the initial concept and discussing it with my manager, I moved forward with turning the idea into a custom Shopify application.
The Goal
The original goal was to create a better way to encourage timely filter replacement and increase filter sales. As I explored the problem, I saw an opportunity to create something much larger.
Rather than simply sending customers another sales message, I wanted to give them a tool that made maintaining their purifier easier.
At the same time, the application could give our internal team a clearer view of purifier ownership, filter activity, and customer needs.
The project evolved into a connected post-purchase experience designed to provide ongoing value to customers while giving our marketing and customer service teams better information and tools.
Building With AI
I had extensive experience working with Shopify from an eCommerce and front-end perspective, but I did not have the coding background to independently develop a custom application.
Instead of letting that stop the project at the concept stage, I used AI to help bring the idea to life.
I collaborated with ChatGPT and Claude throughout development. I determined the application's functionality, features, business logic, user experience, and desktop and mobile designs. AI helped translate those decisions into code and guided me through technical areas that were new to me.
Development became a highly iterative process. I would define what a feature needed to accomplish, work with AI to implement it, test the result, identify issues or opportunities, and continue refining it.
I do not consider myself the coder behind the application. My role has been to direct the product, UX, functionality, testing, and AI-assisted development process while learning how the technical pieces work together.
The Customer Experience
I designed the customer experience around one central question: What would make owning and maintaining an Intellipure purifier easier?
The app gives customers one place to manage their purifiers and ongoing filter maintenance. They can track individual purifiers, add nicknames, view filter orders, record filter changes, see upcoming replacement dates, and manage filter subscriptions.
When a filter is due, customers can add a replacement directly to their cart. They can also add upcoming filter replacement dates to their calendar.
I also designed a personalized reminder system based on each customer's actual purifier and filter schedule. Customers can opt into dynamic email reminders and turn them on or off directly within the app, giving them more control over the communication they receive.
For customers with multiple purifiers, each unit is managed individually so filter changes, replacement dates, serial numbers, and other information stay connected to the correct purifier.
Extending the Experience Across Intellipure.com
As the project evolved, I expanded the experience beyond the dashboard itself. Information customers provide in the app now helps personalize other areas of Intellipure.com, connecting purifier ownership, filter maintenance, and shopping into a more cohesive experience.
Localized air quality, weather, and pollen
When customers are logged in, a homepage widget automatically displays air quality and weather information for their area, bringing relevant outdoor conditions into their clean air experience. The Allergen Report page also includes a widget that automatically displays air quality, weather, and pollen information for customers logged in and not logged in by using a zip code field.
Homepage filter reminders
Once a purifier is set up in the dashboard, filters that are due for replacement can appear directly on the homepage. This gives customers another opportunity to see when maintenance is needed without having to remember to check their dashboard.
Personalized filter compatibility
Filter product pages can display compatibility badges based on the purifiers a customer has set up in their dashboard. Instead of having to remember a model or compare product specifications, customers can more easily identify which replacement filters work with the purifiers they own.
Together, these additions turn the dashboard into more than a standalone filter reminder tool. The information customers provide becomes part of a connected experience across Intellipure.com, helping make air quality awareness, purifier maintenance, and replacement filter shopping easier.
Improving Customer Service
As the application developed, I shared it with our customer service team to get their feedback and understand how it could better support their work.
One of their requests was the ability to store purifier serial numbers. Our customer service team often needs a unit's serial number when helping a customer troubleshoot or service their purifier. Traditionally, the customer has to locate their physical purifier, find the serial number, and provide it to our team.
Based on their feedback, I incorporated serial number collection directly into the purifier onboarding process.
Customers can now save the serial number for each purifier to their account. As customers adopt the app, this will give our team a centralized record of serial numbers for the first time.
When a customer needs assistance, our team can access the saved serial number from the dashboard rather than asking the customer to hunt it down. This has the potential to remove a step from the support process and help our team assist customers more efficiently.
The Internal Experience
I expanded the project beyond the customer-facing app to include an administrative experience for the Intellipure team.
The admin dashboard brings purifier, filter, and customer information together in a way that is much easier to access and act on.
Our team can identify customers with overdue filters, see customers who have never recorded a filter change, understand how many purifiers individual customers own, access stored serial numbers, review filter activity, and filter customer information based on different criteria.
I also designed custom notification functionality that allows our team to communicate with an individual customer, all customers, or owners of specific purifier models.
The analytics dashboard makes information that previously required significant manual research much more transparent. For example, customers who have never recorded a filter change can be immediately identified rather than requiring our team to manually determine that information.
Together, these tools give us new ways to understand customer behavior, target relevant groups, support customers, and make better use of the data connected to purifier ownership.
Testing & Iteration
Testing has been one of the largest parts of this project.
I continually looked beyond the ideal user journey and considered different scenarios that could affect the experience. What happens when someone owns multiple purifiers? What if they purchase another one? What if a purifier is was gifted or simply not purchased directly through our site? What happens if a customer has never changed a filter? What happens when a filter becomes overdue? What should happen when reminders are turned off?
As I tested the application, these questions frequently uncovered new requirements, edge cases, and opportunities to improve the product.
I tested features as they were developed, identified problems, worked through troubleshooting with AI, and repeatedly refined both the interface and application behavior.
The project also continued to expand as I identified additional ways to provide value. This led to features including subscription tools, calendar integration, serial number storage, automatic and manual dashboard functionality, targeted notifications, analytics, and an in-app how-to guide.
The Result
What started as research into ways to increase filter sales became a much larger tool for improving the entire post-purchase experience.
Customers have one place to manage their purifiers, filter changes, replacement schedules, orders, subscriptions, reminders, serial numbers, and future filter purchases.
Our internal team gains a clearer view of purifier ownership and filter activity, along with new tools for customer service, analytics, targeted communication, and customer management.
Most importantly, the application turns information that previously existed across different parts of the customer journey into something both customers and our team can actually use.
App Walkthrough
Photo Gallery
What I Learned
This project pushed me far beyond the type of Shopify work I had done previously.
Before this project, most of my experience was focused on Shopify's customer-facing side. Through building the app, I gained hands-on experience working with VS Code, Terminal, Shopify CLI, Prisma Studio, Shopify's development environment, customer records, orders, application data, and backend processes.
I learned more about how information moves through an application, how data and business logic affect the user experience, and how small product decisions can have much larger technical implications.
I also became much more comfortable troubleshooting technical problems and working through the development process with AI.
I am still not a software developer, but I now have a much stronger understanding of how applications work behind the interface and how to communicate between the product, UX, business, and technical sides of a project.
For me, one of the biggest takeaways was learning that I do not have to limit an idea to the skills I already have. With the right tools, extensive testing, and a willingness to learn, I was able to take an idea from a business problem to a functioning product.