Voice continues to drive the adoption of smart home IoT market today, however we began seeing a shift in user behavior from single voice commands to scenes. We believed the market was emerging into scenes/routines with sensors or triggers to complete the smart home ecosystem. It can be tedious to say 10 different commands in order to turn on all the lights in your home. Scenes/routines provide a much faster and natural way for users to control their homes.  We wanted to build Wemo products that perform these functions within the Apple Home app.

Product Goal: Provide users the convenience to instantly and directly control their smart devices at home. Setup, control, and automation is available in the Apple Home app.

My Role: Support the Wemo UX/UI team as we deliver these projects. Work with PM to define features and strategy. Plan the work, write stories, and align my team on overarching business goals and user goals.

Plan the Work

Working with PM, Marketing, and CA teams, I wrote UX design stories for the Wemo Stage and planned out when we would deliver them.

Since we had plans to release two other projects with similar requirements, I templatized the work for the above project to plan out how we’d deliver the ones that would come after. I included testing and buffer time in the schedule.

Competitive Analysis

The Marketing team would begin working on this project before UX officially got involved, so I provided a high level competitive analysis that identified how other products inform users they can be controlled in the Apple Home app. It helped to inform the team’s decisions around branding, point of sale descriptions, and packaging content.

Findings:

• Most packaging has a "Works with Homekit" badge.

• Amazon web pages and QSGs handle Homekit information differently (no common pattern for informing users of Homekit capability).

• Typically, instructions guide users to manufacturer app for setup and control (whereas we planned to guide users to Homekit for setup and control)

Stage LED Behaviors