Founded in 1906, Leviton Manufacturing Company, Inc. is an American manufacturer of electrical wiring equipment in North America. It produces electrical light sockets, receptacles and outlets, switches, dimmers and other lighting control systems, wire, power cables, power cords, wall and ceiling occupancy sensors, wall plates, datacom, and other electrical products. Leviton is most famous for its Decora wall switch, the flat low profile form factor which replaced the standard toggle switch in many homes and offices.
Leviton built a cloud-connected line of smart home products and needed a mobile interface with which to enroll devices, control devices, and manage a smart home.
Installing home recepticals is difficult for the layman and enrolling devices to a home network makes can make things even more difficult. The in-app experience would need to be well planned, and well tested, to ensure success. Consumer reviews would also have to be closely monitored and complaints rapidly addressed to keep
Our small, co-located engineering team had years of experience in home automation , which informed the design effort and provided a strong advantage. A good competitive analysis helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of your company in relation to the alternatives.
Mapping out user flows and wireflows was an important part of the process. Working with our engineers and our partners (Amazon, Google, Apple, others) I was able to create, iterate, and maintain flows for enrollment, an IoT process that was always in flux.
User testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system. So we decided to use this technique in our app with this tasks:
As the final part of the process, I simplified the printed guidebook that is included with the My Leviton line of products. Here is a version of the Wi-Fi enabled plugin.
