Client
Fantini Cosmi
Year
2016
Role
- UX/UI Designer Freelance
What we did
- Information architecture
- UX Strategy
- User flows
- Personas
- Final UI
Link
Make a smartphone and home thermostat talks.
Create an app to allow the user to manage and control one or more thermostats with their mobile.
Limitations
Design an app approachable by a range of ages, working with an external Development Team, restrictions caused by electronic devices installed in the thermostats.
How I approached
the project
The team was made by 4 people, me (UX Designer), a Senior Designer (Project manager & Information Architect), a developer (DB and Backend Dev), and an electrician (Hardware).
A good starting point of this project was having the chance to decide all the data to collect and then build up the hardware and the DB, so this was the starting point of our work.
Once done, electrician and Dev collected al the feedbacks in terms of data to collect from us (Designers) and the stakeholders.
At this point we started designing user flow and cases, this MVP product did not have many functions.
We created some prototypes using InVision to test the user flows of the app with basics wireframes. The hardest part here was to design all the possible errors that could have occurred during the installation/synchronization of the hardware. We run several tests of connections between phone and thermostat to track all of them.
We also divided the functions in streams and treated them as little ‘’packages’’, in order to work on each of them and focus one process at the time, with the help of specific user tests, taking into consideration the direct feedback from users whilst developing that specific process.
We used different users in terms of age to test this app. Our goal was to create a product easy to use for each of them.
Building use cases
and scenarios
The Take-aways
Having a good setup of the Information Architecture, will avoid having to go back and worked and the previous phases along the way.
Prototypes are essential to show stakeholders how the app and its functions work, this might be useful to those who work in different fields.
I have learned the importance of having a heterogeneous public, to do user tests on.
“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.”
― Ken Liu
