Case Study

Goal: Using an app can make things easier but at times comes in as second choice when making changes, I wanted to know why users would prefer using the hardware over the application provided to them with their thermostat.

After sending out the survey I was able to find that most people would rather change their thermostat manually as opposed to changing it on their mobile app. This was due to their thermostat app being poorly made. This raised another issue because I had to frame the question on assuming that the app ran smoothly, as it should.

Majority of users said that they like to make changes to the temperature while they were away in order to not waste energy.

After gathered my semi-meaningful data, I gathered the needs of the app

Strong call to actions

Nav bar with minimal options

Convenience

Quick Navigation

I did some research on competitors and found somethings I wanted to use for my prototype

Show current temperature

Small space for goal temperature

Icon for scheduling

Icon for fan speed

Eco-friendly/Away Mode

After molding my wireframes around the survey, I stood in front of an obstacle. I had two different pages that I felt could help engagement/usage on the app. One allowing the user to press the familiar -/+ buttons on the bottom the screen to indicate higher or lower, placing a schedule icon in the middle to smoothly transition to scheduled changes. While also leaving room for a quarterly temperature stamp for each day. The other having options at the bottom but leaving more space for the editing of temperature, laid back design allowing for an ease of use.

I was obviously quite biased which one I wanted to move forward with but did some testing of my own to see if I could reassure my design.

I ended up finding out that platforms like Reddit or Discord aren't very fond of the A/B comparison.

It wasn't all bad though, I was able to get some feedback worth keeping. A real *meaningful* A/B test would look something more like me testing a usable prototype with both pages and comparing them based on usage, clicks, obstacles. However, I didn't have much time to spend on that. I used friends and family and took them through a scenario instead. Although it wasn't the data that I wanted I moved forward with what I had.

Users had no idea what each of the buttons did. I ended up adding text under the icons to make it clear what action I'm conveying.

I used Icons of each time of the day. Midnight, Noon, and Afternoon to reduce noise.

I made the navbar a bit smaller in order to increase accessibility.

I added what status the temperature is currently on. Heat, Fan, and Away.