Telekom - Smart Home
Creating the smartest home of all times.
The internet of things is a dream for every technology lover. Controlling your home from the sofa or from far far away is not only useful but can save a lot of money. The Magenta smart home distinguishes itself from the rest for its cross-device compatibility, it almost can control every smart home device. This creates room for a lot of possibilities.
My Role:
In the Role of Senior UX designer, my first task was to rethink how the german consumer used their home heating controls. Together with Junkers (A global company specialized in Heating), I worked on a technical concept that helped users automate their heating to save up as much as possible but never feel cold. After that, I was selected to be part of the taskforce team dedicated to rebuilding the whole smart home experience.
*To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Deutsche Telekom.
Problem Statement
My first task was to analyze the heating behavior of average customers since the goal was to implement smart devices that could automatically regulate the temperature for the users. The golden rule here was that the user should never get back to a cold home. How can a smart heating system be efficient enough to save money, but not being noticed by their users?
German heating sources
While researching for the main sources of heating in the German market we found out that Natural gas was the standard source that is being used in most of the German homes (48%), while Oil (25%) was installed in older buildings. Both sources were more or less working with similar technology, both were heating water that then was distributed to the desired heating areas. The U.S. market has electricity as a standard source. While most having A.C. systems at home, they also use that stems to provide hot air.
Creating a digital thermostat
We wanted to recreate the experience of turning on and off a thermostat. Our main takeaway from observation was that users only have 3 main desires when using a thermostat. Turning on, readjusting temperature, and turning off. The idea was that the user has an on/off switch for each thermostat and if needed he could click and readjust the temperature.
Making Thermostats Smart
Now that we had the individual control of a single thermostat we wanted to include a heating plan. Users wanted different temperatures in different rooms at different times of the day. So we had to design a completely adjustable program that the user can create depending on his individual needs. The Heating panel opens when the user pairs a new thermostat or he navigates to the device recommendation screen and clicks on heating.
In the Heating section, the user sees all rooms that have at least 1 thermostat. 2 default programs are already available so the user can experiment with them first.
When he clicks in the upper right corner he can add a new plan besides having some settings for the heating system itself.
Users can add a new plan with customized heating times. They can easily add or remove heating periods such as copying a complete day or week and re-use it in different rooms.
Once the user has finished editing he's a customized profile, this will appear as a new program in the Heating system screen, He can easily switch between heating programs.
Rethinking the Smart Home experience
While I was finishing the Heating experience the Design team came across other functions that were implemented quickly and where not working properly. The inspiration came from an app called IFTTT which let users combine any service (e.g. When receiving a Facebook message sent me an email to...) that led us to rethink the whole smart home experience from the beginning. Over the years Telekom kept on adding devices to the platform and it was about time to add something that provided value and satisfied the needs of our technology-loving customers.
The Stakeholders however wanted to bring smart home closer to a broader audience, what in other terms meant that the new App needed to be as powerful as it gets, but without being too complicated.
Design Thinking Workshop
We organized multiple design thinking workshops, we set up an iterative process to consider all steps needed to create an innovative product. In the workshops, we had small task groups that focused on a specific part of the product. My team and I worked on the holistic interaction approach for the users, how many layers should the app have to be understandable. How will users navigate through the different sections and so on.
"How might we..." Exercise
Customer Journeys
Because we had different user types we created some personae specifically for the Magenta smart home app. We created the technological enthusiast Harald which already had experience with smart home apps and is interested in extremely customizable experiences. And on the other hand, we created Maike, which had a small sense of smart home technology and needed help throughout her configuration time.
We then studied Harald and Maike with a Customer Journey for each of them, in this way we can explore what the pain points are and if there are unexplored possibilities.
One of the main findings for Maike was that she needed help from the beginning. We came up with the Idea of adding recommendations based on her paired devices. In this way, she would skip the difficult configuration process. On the other way, we needed to position the recommendations in a non-disturbing way to not interrupt the navigation from Harald. These 2 Personas helped us to create a product that suits all the special needs of the different customers.
New Experience new Features
After the research, we started with the Ideation and Decision part. We explored that many users would have different devices that are in different rooms but that needed to be controlled together. Therefore we wanted to create a "grouping" feature what needed to offer a little bit more than only grouping devices due to the different type of devices the app is compatible with. Also, we deeply explored how to get the most out of combining the different devices. This was an extremely complex approach because of the different metrics that all the devices had. But sometimes to create something innovative you need to go over the limits.
Adding "Scenes" Feature to combine devices.
If we think about the most common devices we use in a group we think about devices from the same species, e.gl Lightbulbs, shutters, or thermostats. But what if we wanted to mix lightbulbs with shutters? This is exactly what we wanted to give our customers, extreme customization. When activating a Scene there is something that goes into a certain status. So the user needs to configure the status that will be activated with the scene and having the option to create a second trigger in the same scene that then will activate a second status. In this form, you can use a scene to turn on a lamp to 88% brightness and put the shutter to 20%, and optionally set an off trigger. This way you can now trigger your 2 defined configurations with only 1 device card.
Adding "Automations" the overlord of smart home customization.
The term Human-centered is what drove us to create this concept for the maximum customization feature "Automations" To reduce the complexity and decreasing the learning curve significantly we decided to create a screen where the user always returns to see the configuration of his automation to see what he already has programmed. By having the dialog "If this - Then that - but only when" it made it easier to understand.
So by adding something in "If this" the user can select what will start his automation, this can be a device, a certain time, or even a specific location the user reaches. in the section "then that" the user sets what will happen when it activates, and optional is the section "only when" that represents a status that needed to be fulfilled to activate the automation.
In this example the user selects 2 devices as trigger, if the Netatmo rain sensor "detects rain for over 10 minutes" and the thermostat 1 "temperature is over 25°" then the living room shutter "is 80% closed"
Current implementation
After all the iterations we had in the Ideation and creation phase we started to generate some content for the recommendation automation. The idea was to inspire users to set up some automation even if the necessary devices are not paired yet, this way users see what's possible and consider buying devices based on generated needs through the recommendations. We also had to remove the "Only When" feature from automation because from the technology side it was not feasible at the moment, but in the long term, it is still desired to implement.
The Impact
A lot of Money saved and thousands of smart homes.
Who has an automatic heating profile saves a lot of money, that for sure. But how much? I have tried it myself for 1 year and looked closely at my meter. I saved 35% compared to the previous year, and I was still never cold. That is why I can strongly recommend everyone to install a smart heating system. Best if it is the one from magenta ;)
As for the new experience of the app, we were able to reach a wider audience and combined with good marketing, we put together a small package to help new customers enter the smart home world.