Smart House Controls
About this project
As part of a course taken at the Technion for Designing User Experiences the final assignment was to design an app or website for controlling a smart home from start to finish (research to an interactive prototype).
Roles and Responsibilities
This project was done completely independent.
Did the user experience design including user research, user flows, wireframes and mockups.
The Challenge
The challenge was to create a prototype of a product for controlling a smart home, based on user needs that were discovered by using the UX methodologies learned throughout the course.
The Process
Research
To start off the project I had to define who this product would serve and what the product would need to do for these users.
Method used:
Competitor research
User surveys
Competitor Research
Not having any first hand experience with smart home controls I spent some time trying to understand the landscape.
Some of the questions I asked myself were what's already out there? What do they do? What do people already own?
I found is that there are a lot of solutions to this problem already out there.
Armed with this information I created a user survey to gain some insights into how users are or are not using these devices.
User Survey
Intro
I used a short online survey to gain some quantitative data about what users want to be able to to control and how.
The Results
69.23% wanted to be able to control their devices through a mobile application.
Everyone wanted to be able to control their air conditioners and lights remotely.
70% of respondents were currently using a low tech (offline) device to control devices within their homes already.
Conclusions
This solution should be a mobile application and needs to be able to handle controlling a wide variety of devices but most importantly air conditioners and lights.
Personas
I then went on and took the data received from the survey to build out user personas.
I used 3 personas throughout the design process to make sure that the product I was designing fit with the needs of the users as discovered in the survey.
How did it affect my design?
For example in the survey it was found that users want to be alerted when devices are on and they are not home so this was taken into account that there should be alert system in the app.
User Stories
I used user stories to inform the main flows that the app should be able to accommodate based on the user personas that were defined in the previous section.
Below are just a few user stories that I defined to make sure that my design would solve the needs of my personas.
Sketches
I explored a few layouts for the home screen of the app.
Designs
I took the sketches for the screens and built out the screens using Figma.
To design for the Android ecosystem I followed the guidelines from Google's material design to give the app a clean and consistent look with other apps that the user would encounter on this device.
