Learning Series was a project designed to improve automated lighting. Imagine your home learning your daily routines and turns on lights in your space before you enter. It will also predict the path you’ll be taking to each space.
Product Objectives
Lighting automation that is simple, intuitive, and natural for the average person
Replace the need for a user to manually set their lights, whether from the switch, using their voice, or from an app
It should dim or turn the lights off automatically when not needed. It should turn them on when, or just before, a user enters a room
It should adjust brightness for different times of day and based on different ambient lighting conditions.
Empathize & Define
Pain Points of Smart Homes
Separate Systems
“...most homes currently either have a single smart device installed or use separate systems, with multiple devices that don’t usually interact with one another.”
Education
“While the technology exists, consumers are either not purchasing these devices due to a lack of understanding or not using them to their full extent.”
Need Buy in From the Whole Family
“More people will adopt the smart home devices if it’s easy to use and doesn’t interfere with their existing lifestyle” (i.e. what would be easier than getting up to flick a switch?
Do-It-For-Me not Do-It-Yourself
Onboarding is difficult
Privacy
Public is nervous about their private information
Pain Points of Smart Lighting
1. Lights turning off at an inconvenient time
Opportunity: Make sure we know when users have not moved versus left the room
2. Lights being too bright
Opportunity: Must work fast and seamless when user is walking through their space
3. Having to wait a few seconds before lights respond to app commands
Opportunity: Make sure ambient lighting works well
4. Forgetting to turn lights off in another space
Opportunity: Make sure we turn lights to minimum brightness when users leave a space
Journey mapping to empathize more with the user and outlining opportunities
MVP
How might we onboard the user?
How might we educate the user?
How might we list out users routines?
Ideate: Wireframe & Flow
Onboarding
There were several iterations of the onboarding flow but the main goal was to keep it short and educational.
Presenting users with presets so they didn’t have to manually plug in information
Tutorial bubbles to educate
Confetti welcome screen to trigger a emotional connection
Routines
Problems:
How might we incorporate this new feature seamlessly into our existing app?
How might we educate users on what routines are?
How do we list out routines?
V1 Sense Habits wasn’t consistent to Time Habits cells
V2 We made the cells consistent with Time Habits but the second screen felt redundant
V3 Condense the Sense Habits onto home screen. Consistent with Time Habits
Test
There were several rounds of interviews (5 participants each). We tested out the full buyer journey from product discovery on the website to onboarding to the first learned Routine. We tested to answer the following core questions:
Does the learned Routines concept resonate?
Does U-IQ (learning AI) make sense?
Do the terminologies make sense? One example of a terminology was “Time/Sense” vs “Scheduled/Occupancy”
Do the Learning Groups make sense?
We revised the prototypes as we tested amongst different groups.
What’s next?
We iterate the mobile app with the hardware experience. How might we penetrate the market with this new technology?