Home Automation App
UX/UI Design
One of the first things I did when I started with Clare was initiate a conversation with our users through a customer survey. We asked many questions ranging from satisfaction of the current features to asking what features they would like to see in the future. This initiated all ongoing product design projects for the app including the addition of new features
Our ClareHome app survey results revealed that users either were not familiar with creating an action or they were simply confused about how to use this feature. The current flow for creating an automation, schedule, notification, and scene were the same set of screens to create any of these four different actions. Each of these four actions deserved to have an individual user flow to deliver the best user experience and prevent any mistake actions from being created.
An action can be described as a device carrying out a specific execution based on the conditions defined by the user. An example of an action can be a user selects say the schedules feature where a Monday through Friday schedule is set for a specific set of lights to turn on at a defined time.
As the UX/UI designer at Clare, I was brought on to improve all current applications and create new features for all of our interfaces including a security panel, the dealer facing website and two mobile applications.
During this improvement phase, we started with developing a strong user experience for creating an action in the ClareHome mobile application. I focused on researching competitors' products, created high fidelity mockups and performed user testing via a user testing platform called Useberry, to verify whether the new designs would help our users.
Through a combination of the customer satisfaction survey and customer feedback emails, we were able to determine that the actions section of the ClareHome app needed improvement.
Research started with creating a competitive analysis report to define competitors strengths and weaknesses to better understand where we had room for improvement. The competitive analysis research highlighted the need to redesign our user flows to later exceed our current competitors.
The user testing phase was the most extensive phase of this project. One by one we extracted each action and created a user flow unique to its feature. We started with designing and testing the flow for creating an automation action. This being a more complex action, took a series of multiple separate user tests until we reached a conclusion. The automation user flow sets the foundation for the remaining three action user flows: schedules, scenes and notifications. With this foundation we were able to understand what worked best for the user when moving forward with user testing the remaining flows. The user testing for the remaining user flows became concise compared to automations. Verbiage was one of the biggest challenges we faced during the user testing. A final design decision was reached once the verbiage and designs were improved through multiple iterations in testing. The decision was made once the user test reports demonstrated the highest success rate with the shortest amount of time to complete the task.
In order to deliver a seamless developer handoff, I verified all screens in Figma were connected using the prototype tools. I also write the done conditions with the Jira tickets to ensure all the information needed is available to the developers. In addition to this, we also maintained an exceptional conversation with the developers throughout the process.
This was a gratifying project which also helped bring to light the importance of due diligence and attention to detail. Having this attention to detail allowed me to ensure that all the different scenarios for all of the categories of devices we support would be included in the final developer handoff.
Another insight we discovered was the value of showing users an example or default of each action flow. Showing users an example or default of each action allowed those who had never created an action feel inspired to create their own.
The new action user flows helped reduce the amount of user feedback requests sent through the app. In the end, more users felt confident in creating an action knowing that the created action would be successfully executed. These results meant pleased users are what make a successful business and in turn create loyal customers.
Other successful features that I have worked on and which have since been released in our app include a new shades device feature, new thermostat device controls, performing an accessibility assessment on all platforms, and the addition of toast messages for several areas with different empty states.
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