An iOS & Android App
Re-Imagining the
IoT Consumer Experience
My role on this project was as Lead Product Designer balancing the macroscopic product vision with macroscopic execution and guidance. Working directly with our clients, product owner, other designers, users, and technical team to scope, design, test, and support the delivery of a new app experience for Culligan's new line of connected water treatment offerings in 7 months retaining as much legacy code and framework as possible.
They came to us with a failing app and a task to improve the user experience and support their new products building an app that moves beyond monitoring towards engagement with water.
Problem-Framing
Given the scope of their ask, we first set out to understand their existing ecosystem, current app, target customers, competitor apps, and their expected user journey.
.png)
We discovered that we would need to design a dashboard to unify the products, re-brand the app to fit their desired look and feel, update the connection process, and design a new engagement to change user behavior to either drink more water or use less water dependent upon the types of products they had in their home. The latter directive consuming the majority of our design efforts.
Scoping & Prioritizing
Through collaborative workshops, co-design, and timed prioritization activities, I was able to support our product leadership team to create a budget for researching our riskiest and most unclear directives while aligning on the most practical and known elements to start work immediately.
Though these plans changed as we learned more through implementation, we met weekly to discuss priorities to outline the work to be done and demonstrated in our weekly reviews. We managed to keep design about one week ahead of development
Starting the Work
While coaching our junior designer on the re-branding effort and connection process, I was able to spend time mapping a new system and sketching potential dashboard designs. We had to design a framework to build from.
Research-Driven Design
In order to effectively design for behavior change, we had to understand at a deeper level who we were designing for. We spoke with roughly 20 users and surveyed ~300 customers. The result was an understanding of core values, drivers, and deterrents. These became guiding principles for the entire design.
I will highlight a core engagement function of the app design in order to provide a sample of our rapid testing and iteration design research. We needed to design a way for the consumer to set a drinking water goal in a way that made sense that we would nudge them later on their progress.
From these rounds, we learned that we still didn't have it quite right. We needed to leverage data and present that in an intelligible manner.
And yet, while well received by users, due to further communication with engineering, these designs were too complex to implement given our deadline and budget.
Ultimately, we simplified our design to focus on data insights outside this workflow. Our goal here was to automate goal setting in a timely manner once usage data was known simplifying the experience for our users.
The MVP
Products will always need to balance resources with wants. It's our job as the product team to help bring into creation a product that fits within the usable, feasible, viable, desirable matrix. Through research-driven design, product prioritization with key decision-makers, and a dual track agile development process, we were able to deliver.
This is a small sample of the work done on this app. If you would like to hear more about my process, let's talk!
