HQ Smart Home
HQ Development is a fully integrated smart micro city design leveraging technology to allow users to utilize services that will provide a sustainable, energy efficient, safe and secure place for people to live, work and play. HQ will be the first smart micro-City on the west coast (Vancouver, WA).
THE PROBLEM
Cities that leverage Smart City solutions can improve their energy efficiency by 30% in 20 years. (Postcapes)
The goal is to allow residents and guests to utilize services that will provide a better quality of life, but also provide a framework to achieve a more sustainable and safer environment.
The resident who would be investing in living at the Smart City would be in need of a way to utilize technology as a means of understanding the environment around them.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
Agile framework
MAKE OF THE TEAM
Team of 3 UX designers
KEY GOAL
Provide a way to help residents live a sustainable lifestyle.
MY ROLE
My main responsibility was taking ownership of the Sustainability portion of the Smart Home App. I took a deep dive into learning about key points of interest with conserving energy in living spaces, researching current Smart Home Apps and how they address sustainability, and meeting with leaders in the industry to ask first-hand questions.
Designed and collaborated with 2 other UX designers, the UX Research Team, and the Developers to translate product features for each portion of the application.
I created wireframes and prototypes to share the vision, design principles, and content strategy. This led to thoughtful ideas, team alignment and decision-making.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
The user needs a way to live energy efficiently in order to save money and resources.
Discovering the target user was the first step in understanding the need. I led Discovery sessions with the Product Owners to gain insight into key points of interest. I researched groups that are likely to benefit and gravitate to Smart living spaces to better understand who the future residents would be.
Key characteristics of the target user included;
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Energy Concerned
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Tech Focused
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Community Centered
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Active Travelers/ Remote Workers
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
This project began with user research, story boarding, and workshops. The process involved wireframing, prototyping, and branding.
After determining the User Need and the Target User, we began determining the User Flows for each task a user would need to complete and looking for ways to minimize clicks per task. We used Figma and Figjam sessions to work cohesively as a team.
The visual aspect of the look and feel needed to express and embody the characteristics of how the living enviroment would look once constructed.
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Worked with the Visual Design team to construct a color scheme to match the desired look and feel of the environment.
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Colors were chosen to look nature-based with rich earth tones and accents of blue (sky / water)
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Typography was chosen for a clean, neutral feel ( Montserrat)
THESE WERE SOME MAJOR LEARNINGS OR POINTS WE WANTED TO CALL OUT
TIPS
92% of users said they used tips on how to save energy and electric usage.
SAVING MONEY
87% of users responded that saving money was the most important part to energy saving
HQ Comparison
Users Identified comparing their community to surrounding metro areas as an important feature for buy in
KPI's
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Task success rate
Time-on-task
Search vs navigation
User error rate
FUTURE
The future of the application relies heavily on the new capabilities being implimented in Smart Cities. A future feature included an AI personal assistant.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
LESSONS LEARNED
Keeping a solid view of the overall big picture without getting bogged down in little details helps the agile process.
The biggest challenge I faced throughout this project was advancing with designs, while trying to collaborate. Knowing that this project had multiple features that required ownership from different designers, required a maximum amount of listening to others and taking feedback.
The team spent a disproportional amount of time debating design decisions— when there wasn’t data that could easily be gathered to help drive a decision.
Spending more time researching current Smart Cities and Communities to compare their data prior to diving into the later processes. Interviewing current Smart City residents and learning active pain points.