Honeywell Smart Home Security
• Interaction Design Lead: Drew Covi • Industrial Design Lead: Brian Moy • Industrial Designer: Aleyse McNealy • Research Lead: Megan Peaslee
Role: Lead Interaction Designer, Prototyper, Light and Sound. I lead interaction design within the app and on-device user interfaces.
Objective: The Smart Home Security product was built to fundamentally rethink home awareness and drive value for the 99.9% of the time it’s not sounding an alarm.
Context: Honeywell was initially approached by an undisclosed “fruit company“ to collaborate and deliver on a smart home speaker and security solution. It quickly evolved into a new venture serving a younger, more transient customer.
Outcome: Due to our upfront high fidelity prototyping and 3D printed prototypes, we were able to clearly defi ne a creative vision and make the case for certain hardware requirements. The Smart Home Security product had a very successful Indiegogo launch. A first for Honeywell.
Process - Hardware
Experience design you put in your home: Building a product that lives in your home means ensuring the device is warm and welcoming. I led light and sound design to ensure those goals were met.
Collaborate
To build a compelling product, we needed to first understand who we were designing for, and what their entire journey would be. We collaborated with our talented user research team to map out touch points both physical and digital.
Ideate
How do you replicate an experience for a product that does not yet exist? Where do you start when there is no screen? One of our earliest activities included using foam, paper and whatever we could find to role play and walk through an unboxing and installation.
Evaluate
To build a best-in-class experience, we needed to scrutinize every aspect of the finished product. Fabrics that felt welcome in your home, metals that looked substantial and high-quality, and every interaction from a button-press to a cap-twist.
Emulate
I had heard about Raspberry Pi and I grew more comfortable with the idea of a “headless” computer. With the courage of the internet behind me and a litany of resources in the node ecosystem, I took a crack at pulling together lights, sound and cameras to crystalize our vision.
Validate
To pull of the entire illusion, we had users visit our research labs and pilot the experience with a prototype built in Principle. Monitoring the app from a series of cameras and a two way mirror, we were able to build a convincing experience and synthesize feedback.
Iterate
I took our learnings alongside new iterations of our industrial design and built phase 2 of our prototype, now complete with a more true-to-final representation of fabrics and metals. My work also included leading an exploration into sound design & coordinating reviews of each iteration.
Process - Software
Experience design you put in your pocket: Designing a DIY security system without a screen meant taking a fresh look at how to walk our users through each and every step.
Collaborate
Early on, we knew that we couldn’t control how our system would be unboxed, or whether our users would know to read instructions or download the app. We needed to remove dead-ends. So I led efforts to ensure a user could unbox in any order, and still wind up with a fully operational system.
Ideate
From a high-level user journey, I was able to distill the overall installation into discrete yet consistent workflows. Each sensor was fundamentally similar but had it’s own methods of mounting and testing. We also ensured that consistent lighting and sound behaviors on the base station reacted to in-app events.
Validate
I used Principle to help organize interaction flows and create an app prototype that was convincing enough that our research team could perform evaluative testing in conjunction with an installation hub “puppet.” I tracked interactions using an overhead camera and triggered events on the hub.
Indiegogo
In a first for Honeywell, we delivered our initial concept through Indiegogo to help showcase our process and test the marketability of the product long term. The launch was a success and reached it’s target goal for initial launch.
