A smart way of happy living with secure Smart Home.
Overview
Objective
Design an App for Home electronics appliance control and informative insights, notifications for home users to improve the quality of life and convenience in the home.
My Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
4
Timeline
3 Weeks
Research & Define
User Surveys
We started our research by sending out Google Form Survey to our targeted users. We discovered that most of the smart phone users want to control their appliance securely from anywhere and get important alerts inform of notifications in an understandable way.
User interviews
In order to design Smart Home App with a great user experience, I had to first identify the needs of the target audience. To better understand the perspective of users, I had spoken with them directly. I interact with 3 of my target users.
After completing the interviews, I wrote down all of the responses on sticky notes and began to cluster them based on topic.
Ideate & Design
KNX Standard
KNX is an open standard for commercial and domestic home, building automation. It is a standardized protocol for building control and also has its place in traditional home automation. KNX is the world’s only open standard for building control and automation and can make major energy savings of up to 60%, significantly reducing the carbon footprint of a building. This is truly green sustainable technology that can be applied to small and large buildings alike.
KNX the Standard is approved as:
- European Standard (CENELEC EN 50090 and CEN EN 13321-1)
- International Standard (ISO/IEC 14543-3)
- Chinese Standard (GB/Z 20965)
- US Standard (ANSI/ASHRAE 135)
The standard has been adopted by many international manufacturers who together provide a vast array of KNX certified products for a range of building control applications including lighting, HVAC, intruder alarms, audio visual systems, household appliances, blinds/solar control and automatic window control, facade management, energy management and control, metering, monitoring applications.
Choosing from this pool of technology, KNX Integrators, KNX Specifiers and KNX Developers can build entire control solutions by bringing together a variety of off-the-shelf components which are truly interoperable and are programmed using KNX tools.
source: knxuk.org
System Architecture
Initial Sketches
Outcomes
Key Value Deliverables
- Easily integrate with other standard automation appliances
- Offline working within home via smart phone app
- Free lifetime app updates
- Add family members (up-to 5) for automation control
- Interoperable with any voice assistant like Amazon alexa, Google Home, Apple siri
Key Learnings
This project is extension version previous home automation project, enhanced with smart phone app, apple watch app and follow KNX standards. While at research stage we interact with our old customers, customer service team, marketing team and get feedback from them. Few of the main things I learned in this journey are think about installation side pain points as well as provision of easy trouble shooting without disturbing whole installed system which reduces customer support team effort and customer hassle. Other one from competitor analysis I filter out one of the best option offline working when there is no internet. With emerging growth of smart phone technology smart phone models changed every 1 year. So, me and my team decided to upgrade their app at any time with their new mobile or OS. That’s the idea we came up with one of the main USP free lifetime updates.
Disclaimer: Most of the products/projects I am involved as a UX Designer/Project Manager/Jr. IoT Solution Architect are Government Smart City and Industrial IoT related. So, due to NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) polices so much of information not revealed. Information is fully confidential.