The Ask: To create a UX strategy for the future of the Lyric Dashboard using feedback from contextual inquiry and adjacent market trends.
Team Composition: 2 Senior Experience Designers
My Roles: Lead Interaction Design, Lead Design Researcher
Phases: Contextual Inquiry, Story telling, Interaction Exploration, Alignment Workshop
Project Length: 1 week research (5 families), 2 weeks synthesis, 1 month for story telling and interaction exploration, 1 day workshop with product team.
Challenges: Creating an experience that exposed helpful information and reduced clutter.
Learnings: As this was the first advanced design project at Honeywell, it was interesting to see how the project grew and evolved within the corporation. This was a great way to show how the Austin studio could work given more opportunities like this. This project was never implemented to the app, but it opened doors for the studio, and that was the greater success.
After creating the research protocol, we created a screener and reached out to young families in the Austin area. We spent an hour at each home and asked general questions about experience with connected home devices and other app experiences.
These findings were synthesized and a set of design principles were created.
The overwhelming feedback was around connecting family members and finding information that was helpful and not just mental clutter. We explored social apps to understand how they differ from Connected home apps to see how we might take the most appropriate parts and used them for our purposes. The first step was to determine how to create an app that put people first. To do this, we did a quick audit of social apps and compared those to connected home apps.
To help refine direction, we mapped several potential use scenarios. These were used to help define feature sets and general use direction. The different scenarios created a useful way to explore architectures as well.
From here we began to iterate on potential UIs that reflected the design principles and use cases.
