Modernizing Honeywell's Smart Home Control

Honeywell previously had a connected home app called Lyric, but the initiative was to rebuild an improved version under the Honeywell name and brand. During this time, there were many other competitors in the smart home space, so the challenge was to create a product that users would want to use over the others.

Launched the Honeywell Home app, which, within the first two years of its release, had over 2 million users and a 4.5 star rating on the app store.

The previous app was overrun with loaders that would temporarily pause the users interaction. To improve this experience, I worked on a new loading interaction. The concept was to load cached data first and then morph it into current data. This meant that even while the app was loading, users could get oriented with the information they were about to see.

One of the harder interactions to nail down was how camera-owners could speak through their devices. I originally designed a solution that mimicked other platforms, but we found that participants during our usability studies were missing crucial concepts. Most notably: did they have to keep the button pressed in order to speak, or did they only have to tap once? The solution came after much tweaking; I made the button larger and more responsive so that users were more aware of the ongoing interaction. We also included a label that would pop up after the button was pushed to instruct the user to start speaking.