Finding your way around

There are only four pieces of navigation in the whole product, and none of them move. A sidebar holding every destination. A top bar holding search, theme, notifications and help. A command palette on ⌘K that goes anywhere without the sidebar. And, on a phone, a bottom bar that replaces the rail rather than shrinking it.

The sidebar, in five groups

The rail is dark, 240 pixels wide, and permanently on screen on anything wider than a tablet. The CleanFlo wordmark sits at the top, your account row at the bottom, and between them fourteen destinations in five groups. The grouping is not decoration: it is the shape of the working day, running from what is happening now to what you only touch occasionally.

Messages is the only row that ever changes. When somebody has written to you it grows a count on the right, and that count stops at "99+" rather than growing into the label. Below the nav sit two quiet links, Privacy and Terms, and below those the account row: your initials in a circle, your name, your company name underneath. Clicking it opens one item, Log out. There is no settings shortcut hidden in there and no account switcher.

The strip along the top

Sixty-four pixels of translucent chrome, identical on every screen. Reading left to right: the search trigger, the page title, then four buttons in the corner.

The theme toggle has no "system" setting, which is on purpose. CleanFlo stays light unless you have explicitly asked for dark, so a laptop that flips to dark at sunset does not flip the app underneath you mid-invoice.

The help button is worth a try at least once. On Schedule it opens "Creating a New Job". On Clients it opens "Adding a New Client". On Settings it opens "Company Settings". It matches on the section rather than the exact page, so it still works from inside a client record. When there is no article for a screen it drops you at the front of Support instead of doing nothing.

The ⌘K palette

Press ⌘K anywhere, or Ctrl+K on Windows, and a search box drops over the middle of the screen. Its placeholder is "Search clients, staff, jobs, inventory, services…", and that undersells it: it also searches incidents, audits, risk assessments and the help articles built into the app.

It searches your whole workspace at once, not the screen you are on. Results arrive grouped, always in the same order, with up to five rows per group and a count beside each heading.

The full set of groups, in the order they appear: Clients, Locations, Staff, Inventory, Jobs, Services, Incidents, Audits, Risk Assessments and Help Articles. Each has its own colour, kept the same everywhere: clients are sky blue, locations amber, staff green, jobs teal.

Help Articles is the group people find by accident and then keep using. It is the in-app knowledge base, searched locally, so it answers instantly and works whether or not the rest of the query finds anything.

The box has three things to say before it has any results for you.

Once there are results, a footer appears along the bottom reading "↑ ↓ navigate · ↵ open · esc close", which is the whole keyboard contract. Arrow keys move the highlight, Enter opens the highlighted row and closes the palette, Escape closes it without going anywhere. There is also an esc badge inside the input itself, and an X to clear the query without closing.

The bell

The bell collects three different kinds of thing and keeps them apart with tabs: All, Emails, Notifications and Activity. Emails are messages CleanFlo has sent on your behalf. Notifications are push alerts. Activity is the log of who did what in your account.

Each row is a coloured icon, a line of text and a time-ago stamp. The stamps go "Just now", then minutes, then hours, then days, and once something is more than a week old it switches to a plain date like "12 Aug". Colour follows the subject rather than the urgency: jobs are green, invoices amber, clients teal, inventory sky, staff blue, health and safety red.

A Mark all as read link sits in the header, and it only appears when there is something unread, so an empty header means you are up to date. If nothing has happened yet the panel shows a bell and the words "No activity yet".

One extra card can appear at the top of the panel, once. If your browser supports push alerts and you have not been asked yet, CleanFlo offers them here rather than firing a browser prompt at you unannounced: "Get job alerts", "Know when a job is assigned or finished, even with CleanFlo closed", and a Turn on button. If you have already blocked notifications at the browser level it says so instead, and tells you it is your browser settings that need changing rather than anything in the app.

On a phone

Below 768 pixels the sidebar is not narrowed, it is switched off. What replaces it is a bar along the bottom of the screen with four items, sitting where your thumb already is.

Dashboard, Schedule and Messages are the three an owner opens standing in a car park between jobs. More opens a full-screen dark menu carrying the whole rail: a Search everything button at the top, then the same five groups in the same order with the same labels, then your account row and Log out at the foot.

It is a full screen rather than a panel sliding in from the side, because on a phone the navigation is the screen while it is open. Tapping any row closes it and takes you there. So does the browser back gesture.

The offline banner

A thin bar appears at the edge of the screen when the connection is doing something worth telling you about. There are exactly four states, and each one says a different thing.

The banner never shows on the cleaner app. That half of the product has its own offline handling, drawn into the job screens themselves rather than bolted along the top of them.