CREATING A
SMART HOME
Thermostat
the brief
Design a mobile thermostat app. We would like to see your thinking and visual skill behind an iPhone app that contains some minor flow around a smart thermostat app. Think through only 2-3 screens. Something that shows the general core use of the app. Look to competitors in this space for inspiration. Do you show current temp? Do you show goal temp? Why?
thinking it through
For this variation, I decided that time was something we could not get rid of. People want to be able to wake up warm or come home to a nice cool house. So for this mockup, I wanted to create a place where users could add in time periods to adjust schedules. The idea would be that there would be a setup process similar to that of a non-smart thermostat, leading you through a series of steps.
editing the schedule
This was by far the most challenging part of the process. For this variation, I decided to remove the element of time from the equation to better allow myself to just create. I came up with an interesting concept, using sliders to easily adjust temperature based on days of the week. This way, users can adjust for weekends.
vaCATION MODE
A "nice to have" feature I added was a vacation mode. During initial setup, the user would choose what they want their temperature to cool or warm to when they leave for a long period of time, to save energy.
additional designs
Figuring out how to display LITERALLY 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and temperature proved to be very difficult. The initial dashboard/display was fun and frankly, easy to come up with. I played with some neumorphism to create a 'touch' experience without actually creating touch. In the end, I chose to bag these ideas to keep things simple, and I went with a very simple "apple-like" design that works well when showing multiple variables.
For research, I did some competitive research to see what others are doing. Nest does something similar to the screen on the right, (which in my opinion, is poorly executed in the app).
Solution
