Honeywell Thermostat
An intuitive and efficient interface for managing room temperatures, individual room controls, fan modes, and access to various settings.
Role
- Sole UI/UX Designer
Tools
- Figma
- Adobe Illustrator
- Photoshop
Duration
- 4 Months
- 10 hours a week
Overview and the Problem
In this UI design, I created a digital thermostat application tailored for Honeywell, a renowned company in the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) industry. The primary goal of the app is to provide users with an intuitive and efficient interface for managing room temperatures, individual room controls, fan modes, and access to various settings.
Background Research
In the initial research phase, user interviews shed light on crucial aspects of potential users thermostat preferences:
Simplicity and Intuitiveness: Users prioritize an interface that is easy to navigate and understand, without unnecessary complexities.
Clear Display: Clear and legible temperature readings and intuitive icons are preferred, with adjustable brightness for various lighting conditions.
Customization: Users seek options to personalize settings and schedules to fit their lifestyle and preferences.
Smart Home Integration: Seamless integration with popular smart home platforms like Google Home and Amazon Alexa is desired for convenient control.
With these user preferences in mind I broke up the clients and potential users needs and wants into main features and secondary features.
Main Features
Secondary Features
The Flow
The flowcharts primary focus is on the user’s journey and experience. Each step of the flowchart is meticulously crafted to ensure that users can easily navigate the interface, adjust temperature settings, and access additional features without friction. The flow is simple and the user can access any screen in less than two clicks.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Hand-drawn sketches serve as essential components for quickly exploring and refining UI screen layouts. They offer a direct pathway to transform abstract concepts into designs, fostering creativity and facilitating iterative improvements. By simplifying complex UI elements, these sketches effectively convey design concepts and allow for meaningful feedback integration in these early stages. With these hand drawn sketches I created a Low-fidilty prototype.
Usability Testing
at gathering insights from a diverse pool of users. Five individuals from various backgrounds were recruited to ensure a comprehensive assessment of the interface’s effectiveness across different demographics. All participants were asked the following questions.
“Change the temperature of all rooms to 68ºF.”
“Change the temperature of Room 3 to 71ºF.”
“Schedule the to turn on January 31st at 6:00 PM.”
“Go to the settings and change the temperature scale from Fahrenheit to Celsius.”
“Adjust the fan mode to off and the heat/cool mode to off.”
Results
During the usability testing phase, several notable issues were identified with the interface design:
Slider Functionality for Temperature Adjustment: A subset of testers did not intuitively recognize the slider’s function to adjust the temperature. Among those who did, there was notable difficulty in precisely landing on the desired temperature due to potential usability challenges.
Button Interaction Challenges: Testers encountered difficulties with the fan and mode buttons, primarily attributed to the insufficient touch area provided for interaction. This led to instances of unintentional miss-clicks and user frustration.
Navigation to Scheduling Functionality: A noteworthy observation was that certain testers attempted to schedule heating cycles by navigating into the settings menu rather than accessing the dedicated scheduling section. This indicates a potential discrepancy in the discoverability of scheduling features within the interface.
High Fidelity Prototype
In the final design I took what I learned from my usability studies and applied them to get these final designs.
Click Here for Figma File
