T9 & T10 Pro Smart Thermostats
End-to-end mobile experience design
Project Overview
Honeywell wanted to launch new top-of-the-line smart thermostats that push the boundaries of existing functionality and introduce new features.
My Role
I led the UX/UI design for the end-to-end mobile app experience, including feature conceptualization, wireframing, prototyping, research, and delivering full design specifications for developers.
The Team
I collaborated frequently with a design researcher and the thermostat’s embedded UI designer. I also worked closely with product management, software and firmware engineers, and a visual designer.
The Challenge
Design a superior smart thermostat with remote sensors that feels intuitive, despite underlying feature complexity.
Design Approach
Research
Product Tear-down
Concept Prototype Testing
Design & Validation
Design Hand-off
Research
I worked closely with our research team throughout this project to ensure I understood and addressed user needs. I utilized generative research, performed product tear-downs, reviewed heuristic evaluations, and conducted in-lab testing.
Product Tear-down
I led a research effort involving product tear-downs that identified key ways to simplify how users install and configure thermostats.
From my research I created a logical mapping document using Omnigraffle to illustrate the relationships between thermostat wiring and configuration options.
Thermostat wiring vs configuration options
Concept Prototype Testing
Research found that a recurring issue for homeowners is the presence of hot or cold spots in the home. To address this, our solution was to conceptualize and test a new feature that uses remote sensors to allow homeowners to prioritize comfort in areas of their home.
Using Omnigraffle and Adobe Xd, I created concepts and prototypes that were then used to conduct in-lab testing.
Concept for selecting sensor mode
Sensor install process testing
Mobile prototype testing
Design & Validation
I designed the end-to-end mobile experience for the thermostat to create low-fi to hi-fi wireframes and detailed workflows.
Throughout the design phase, I assisted our research team with validation testing on design iterations. We used various methods from heuristic evaluations and peer reviews to in-lab testing.
Design tools used
Workflow documentation
High-fidelity wireframes
In-lab user testing
Design Hand-off
Once designs were finalized, I created detailed design specifications to hand-off to our development team and met with developers as needed for documentation reviews.
Design specification documents
Design specification documents
Outcomes
The logic mapping I created while researching thermostat configuration was used to enable wire-sensing technology, drastically streamlining the installation experience.
The T9 and T10 Pro Smart Thermostats launched in the summer of 2019 and have been sold into hundreds of thousands of homes across North America.