T-Mobile Smart Home
2017–2021 · Product strategy & design systems
I came to T-Mobile to introduce a design system to their SmartHome product. It was a legacy product that unfortunately became fairly bloated over time, with ~120 screens in the mobile app, that didn’t really share even the same colour scheme, had ~30 different button styles, etc.
During the cleanup, it became obvious that the user experience issues were similarly deep. The product had endless capabilities to do “everything”, but the question “like what?” uncovered that there wasn’t much clarity about good use cases. Moreover the setup was so difficult that the product was basically a geeky playground. The problem was that it was being offered as a consumer product in T-Mobile stores.
I started developing a concept of “stories” – everyday situations that resonate with consumers. Like “when I wake up, turn on the lights and turn up the heating” or “when I leave the house, turn off all lights and turn on the motion sensors”. I started persuading the team that these are no-brainers, and that they need to work out-of-the-box in a consumer product, zero config. In fact, the stories are the product – not the app, not the hardware facilitating it.
We started as a four-person “skunk works” team, where I was the only designer. We developed the concept, built prototypes and tested them with users. The company later made it the primary Smart Home project, reallocated more than 100 people to it and decided to phase out the old product.
I introduced the atomic design system, coordinated its implementation with developers across platforms, and oversaw visual consistency across a design team of roughly ten. The product rolled out in eight countries.
The new product won the Red Dot Award and the iF Design Award.
Concepts
Final product
“It’s rare that you come across exceptional talent like Josef. He showed outstanding product design skills and a deep understanding of product strategy.”
“I was particularly impressed by Josef’s ability to remove nonessential complexity from the product, which led to extraordinary results in user testing.”