Mana

Control your home’s smart devices, keep track of your energy use and monitor your solar production, all in one extensive and intuitive app.

I’m a proponent of renewable energy and sustainability, which is why I decided to design a concept app which merges the management of smart home technology, energy efficiency, and the ability to monitor solar production (and, in principle, other sources of energy production, like wind).

In order to complete this project in a limited amount of time, my focus was primarily on designing the UI. For the research phase I relied on competitive analysis and a much more limited amount of user research than I would like to have done — mostly in the form of reading feedback and reviews from users of other similar apps. The most notable challenge of this project was to understand what is important to the users of these apps and how to organize features and present information in a manner which is intuitive and meaningful.

While many apps (and concept projects) exist which have some of the features I intended to incorporate, few had all of them. There are numerous well established smart home apps but the majority are focused almost exclusively on device control and not the monitoring of energy consumption / production. I can only speculate as to why this is the case, however this observation leads me to the conclusion that this is, at least at the moment, a niche market relative to the larger smart home app market. It would be critical to define user / customer segments quite precisely and to conduct ample user interviews and usability tests with these segments before transitioning into development.

While I certainly didn’t have the opportunity to do as much research as I would have liked to, one insight I gained is that presenting ‘raw’ numbers / metrics, without providing context or organizing them in a manner which is useful to users could lead to a sub-optimal and potentially confusing experience. It’s important to keep in mind who the users are and that outputting what could be relatively technical information in a format which is easy to understand and meaningful to them is vital to ensuring a good UX.