Case study
T-Mobile Smart Home
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.
Initially, T-Mobile allowed a small “skunk works” team of 4, and we further designed & developed the concept, created first prototypes, and ran first user tests with great success. A few weeks later they gave us 150 more people and grandfathered the old product, which was just impossible to fix anymore.
The new product won the Red Dot Award and the iF Design Award. And the concept of stories was further validated by Apple, who introduced it to their smart-home product too.
