project Overview

Caremo is a fictional tech company I created for this specific college project. It’s main service is to provide IoT solutions to manage electronic household devices through the mobile app.

Role

Product designer

Agency

University

Date

2019

The problem

Since we are living in a fast-paced world, it’s becoming more common for people to forget simple things like turning off their household devices when they left the house. This provokes higher electric invoices and money expenses. Also, each device has its own control, and the people must be at home to control them.

Solution

The main idea to solve these problems was designing an APP to control electronic household devices through it, using the IoT (internet of things) concept. Thanks to this, the user doesn’t need to be at home to manage their devices and will be able to execute actions like turn off and schedule them from anywhere with an unique control.

My role

Since this was an individual college project, I had to create it from scratch assuming many roles. I designed the entire product, including the visual identity and the launch campaign ads to promote the app.

The design process

I used the design thinking approach for this project. The tools include Adobe XD, illustrator, photoshop, and google docs.

Empathize

User research

Questionaries

Online surveys

User personas

For the user research, I did an online questionnaire with key questions to 7 participants, female and male from 23 to 55 years old. Some key findings are:

Most of them use the internet on their phones for more than 10 hours daily.

72.4% of the participants have left at least one household device on after leaving the house.

87,7% of them haven’t used an app like this.

Defining the problem

Problem statement

User stories

In this phase I started defining the problem as user stories, taking into consideration the research findings and the general problem.

As a user, I want to turn on and off my household devices so that I can control them from anywhere.

As a user, I want to schedule my house’s lamps so that I can save money from electric invoices.

As a user, I want to control my house’s air conditioner from my phone so that I can manage it from anywhere.

Ideating solutions

Brainstorming

Sketches

Wireframes

Information architecture

Userflows

Here I started to generate ideas to solve the problems defined in the user stories. I also did some simple sketches to visualize my ideas.

Design & Prototyping

Design direction

UI Design

Interactive prototype

Since this was a very extensive project for a one-person (me) product design department, and a very short time limit, in this phase I focus the prototyping for two of the main categories: air conditioner and light bulbs.

Testing

Guerrilla testing

With the prototype ready, I created the link and run guerrilla testing with five users, focusing on two main categories: air conditioners and lamps. First, I commented to the participants about the general Idea, then I explain the test process, and finally, I observed their reactions. The main tasks were focused on connecting the devices, turning them on and off, scheduling the device, and seeing the status. After that, I ask them some questions about their general experience of using the app.

CAREMO