Overview

Smart Home IoT

Jarden is a company that creates connected smart home safety appliances such as smart smoke carbon monoxide detectors, environmental monitors, or personal safe

I worked on this project as the UX and information architecture adjustments, in collaboration with a full scrum team including local and remote developers, scrum master, QA engineers, and a product analyst.

Tools
Methods

Sketch, mood-boarding, information architecture, style guide, protoyping, animations.

Project Brief

My task on this project initially started as simply designing error modals; however, as I worked on this project, it was a conscious choice that from the best user's perspective, error prevention is a superior experience as to relying error recovery. By observing user's behavior, information architecture and visual hierarchy adjustments, I was able to help the users prevent some of the errors in the first place.

For this project, the toughest challenge is designing a connected home experience ensuring that users can easily find the desired physical device in situations where the users have multiple devices across many locations, as well as accounting for the the physical proximity of the user to the product can impact the responsiveness of the communication between the application and the physical product.

Info Architecture

User Flow

For this project, understanding the user's behavior pattern when interacting with the product was especially important in error prevention. To understand the user's mental model, I observed how users address common home appliances across their household and used card sorting to help me understand the user's approach.

Once I was able to understand a pattern from the users, I adjusted the information architecture in the app accordingly to reduce the amount of steps the user is required to locate the correct device.

UI Design

Selected Screens

Since the majority of our users are families with young kids, I decided to approach the visual direction with friendly illustrations that invokes the feeling closest to the environment at home. It was important for the direction to feel friendly, but not overly cartoony to the point where the user can lose confidence in the product.

Development

Working with Devs

Part of the challenge for this project is working with developers and QA remotely. In situations when communication becomes difficult, I created flow charts as a communication tool accounting for the conditions so the QA engineers and developers can easily use as reference.