RHEA Smart Home System
By: Kat Brissette
Tags: Case Study, Branding, Smart Home, UX, Design Systems

Overview

In developing this smart home system, our goal was to create a user experience that was as seamless as possible. We conducted extensive user research which helped us narrowed down our audience to a specific demographic: young professionals who needed to balance their work and personal lives while maintaining self-care. Through numerous surveys and interviews, we examined the pain points that exist between an individual and their at-home devices to identify how to make their experience easier and more user-focused.

The research process was extensive and thorough. To get an understanding of how to design with the user at the forefront of our mind, Abby had us read User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant. After that, we worked as a team to conduct surveys with almost 200 people. We spent hours parsing through the research and brainstorming in order to create unique user personas and understand the needs of our target users.

Each team member focused on multiple aspects of the project: branding, UX/UI, illustration, research, 3-dimensional renders, and more. We all had opportunities to jump into various facets of the project at different points which allowed us the balance the workload while giving everyone a chance to experience many areas of design needed to complete a project of this scale.

While we envision a family of products that span the entire home, for the sake of time we selected four products to feature for our initial launch: a door lock, a coffee maker, an oven, and a central hub that connected the other three products. After putting together countless wireframes and user flows, the UI/UX team began designing the product interfaces. As the chosen devices held unique functions and interactions, we needed to develop a robust design system.

Our semester was entirely online, so as a team we had to overcome various challenges. This included figuring out designing in Adobe XD collaboratively, working around our schedules to hold regular Zoom meetings, and planning work sessions without the benefits of meeting in-person.

However, as a silver lining, we had the opportunity to meet many incredible people who were kind to stop by during class time. Several designers came to our class, shared their work with us, and gave us helpful feedback about our project.

The guest speakers included:

Lucas Ballasy — Partner/Creative Director at Barrel, interviewed us at the beginning of the semester to establish our unique roles within the team.

Sergio Claudio, Global Creative & Experience Leader at Adobe, took a look at our branding and research in the early phase of this project and provided great insight on how to think moving forward.

Jane Leous, Mechanical Engineer at Agilent Technologies, taught us about engineering, making sure that we would take care to think of material and tactile feel for the physical product design.

Courtney Spencer, Global Manager, Design at ZX Ventures, visited us in class to chat and introduced us to her processes in working with design systems within a team, particularly in XD.

Gavin Cooper, Senior Manager of UX Strategy at Vanguard, spent the time to critique our wireframes and UI for the coffee maker and shared his thoughts on the idea of “minimum vs maximum” interactions.

Zachary Gibson, Art Director, Design Systems lead at Google Nest at Google, talked about his experiences at Google, and answered countless questions about his experience working on Material Design.

Sara Hall, User Experience Practice Lead at the City of Philadelphia, gave feedback as we grew closer to the final UX systems of our products and spoke on her industry experience.

John Ruiz, Design Lead (UX/UI) at Apple, provided industry insight on his background and growth into the UX industry and spoke about his specific experiences working at Apple.

We give them all a special thanks for helping us with RHEA.

Research

Brainstorming

Our prompt was: Create and design a series of devices under one parent brand for a smart home.

When brainstorming how to approach this project, we asked ourselves a few questions. Who was going to be our main audience, and what was their demographic? What was their age, occupation, and how many people lived in their household? What cities were they located in? Should we take a realistic approach or can it be dystopian or fantasy? Was it set in the present or could it be in the future?

From there, we came up with goals for our smart home devices. We definitely wanted these items to contribute to the comfort and safety of the home. We also wanted the brand to be light-hearted and visually appealing.

After several (virtual) brainstorming sessions, we developed a survey and began to reach out to people for research.