Linksys wanted to enter a new market, and their smart WiFi mesh nodes already shipped with the technology to help make that happen: Zigbee.

Since Linksys nodes can already see and talk to the all connected IoT devices in a home, the business team wanted to make it the center for smart home control. Meaning you could onboard and control smart home products using a Linksys node and the Linksys Smart WiFi App.

Zigbee smart lighting was intended to be the first step in this plan.

My role: Design the user experience for a number of features within the Zigbee Smart Lighting project.

Grouping Bulbs

Goal: Give users the ability to control a group of bulbs with a single command.

Defining a Set of Features

Utilizing industry norms and learnings from usability testing, I determined the architecture for organizing smart lights within a home. When introducing new features to a team, it is highly beneficial to define characteristics of those features so that people do not get caught up debating WHAT the feature is, and instead we can begin thinking HOW the feature can be implemented.

Usabillity Testing

To identify users’ mental model of the lighting in their home, I had them provide a map of their home layout. Afterwards they were asked what type of lighting fixtures they have in different rooms and how they interact with them them. 

We found that:

• Users control lights by:

  • Home: When coming home, leaving, going to bed, or waking up.

  • Room: When entering/exiting a room, 1 of x people goes to bed/wakes up

  • Group: Adjust brightness/mood of a room

  • Individually: Adjust brightness/mood of a room

• Less often, users individually adjust the lights within a group

• Some users already had smart lights in their home, and enjoyed the ability to individually adjust the brightness level and color of lights within a group. However, they did this infrequently and typically had only a few settings they would reuse when doing so.

Wire Frames and Flows

Below are some of the flows I designed for the “Grouping Bulbs” feature.

Here are some designs I worked on for adjusting color of a bulb