The global smart thermostat market is estimated to grow YoY at 20.1% in the next 4 years. Partially driven by the overall growth of the smart home market but also driven by the increasingly high purchase intentions for smart thermostats. According to Park Associates, "adoption of smart thermostats is the highest of any home automation product." However, the biggest barrier to entry for consumers is price. Nest and Ecobee dominates the current smart thermostat market with premium priced thermostats starting at $169.99, and majority of consumers enter the market through rebates and giveaways from electric utilities. For example, Southern California Edison (SCE) provides $75 rebate for consumers that purchase a Ecobee or Nest Thermostat. Hence, we believe that the market calls for a low-cost, affordable smart thermostat.
Problem: We want to sell a well-designed, low-cost thermostat. As such, we needed to provide users with the ability to perform simple and complex tasks on their thermostat using a very minimal interface
My Role: Led the interaction design for this project
Get to know our users
Who’s going to buy this Thermostat?
Ages 34-50
Mostly homeowners
Some renters
Expectations
Easily see the current temp in their home
Know if their thermostat is actively cooling/heating to a set temp
Know what mode their thermostat is in
Adjust set temperature
Competitive Analysis
Most connected thermostats have a higher price point than what we’re targeting for our product. They offer many more features that are controllable either on the hardware or in the parent app. Our thermostat has a much slimmer feature set, and will rely on Apple Home app as the parent app.
Common themes that I carried over into the design:
View current ambient temperature
Know if thermostat was actively heating or cooling to a set temperature
Display the mode the thermostat is in (heat, cool, auto, etc)
User Testing
Methods: Remote user testing
Limitations: Covid / Remote testing meant we couldn’t create a high fidelity hw prototype for users to test with.
Workarounds: I approached our ID team to create prototypes that we could ship to testers each week. As some interactions were difficult to test using just a digital prototype on a computer.
Findings:
Users easily increase /decrease temperature (+/- icons being commonly understood)
Users had some trouble knowing what modes were available on the thermostat and how to switch between them (solved this by showing all modes when thermostat is first turned on – discovery)
Users had significant trouble setting auto mode range. It’s the least used mode of the 3, and the simplicity of the thermostat display made it difficult to perform complex tasks like this one
Auto Mode: Designing complex interactions
I worked with the ID, FW, and PM teams to decide
if we wanted to offer Auto Mode adjustment on the thermostat HW display
How we might offer users the ability to adjust auto mode range
Challenges:
Not all users know what auto mode is
The simple design of the thermostat seemed to conflict with our desire to let users perform a somewhat complex interaction on it.
Should we offer users the ability to adjust the auto mode range on our thermostat? Or should we depend on the app for these controls?
How do other thermostats offer Auto Mode?
Different options for offering Auto Mode on our Thermostat
