For a typical Norwegian household, 60% of the power bill comes from heating, making this a natural IoT segment for Vibb to explore.

In this project, I led the design process, working closely with Vibb’s management, engineering, and marketing teams. Each team helped shape the direction and success of the project.

We began this project by conducting extensive research on competitors to understand the pain points and opportunities we could address. Early on, we discovered that one of the biggest challenges was scheduling. At the time, none of the existing apps had solved scheduling in a way that wasn’t cumbersome. Either the display tried to show too much information at once, or the editing process was equally overwhelming. Addressing this became our top priority.

We focused early on concept sketches, as we believed the primary challenge lay in the interaction design of the scheduling feature. Our goal was to explore as many different solutions as possible to see if we could create a scheduling system superior to those found in existing apps. We also discussed flexiblity, how flexible should we allow our users to be. Too flexible could become complex, and to rigid could become ..., or even descrimenating on users who did not have a traditional 08-16 workday.

In parallel with this project, I also worked on redesigning the IoT section of our app. We were simultaneously redesigning the smart charging feature. Initially, these two projects had unique designs to meet their specific needs, but as we progressed, we had the idea of incorporating the concept of transferred learning into our app. This meant that if a user was already familiar with one of our IoT features, they would find it easier to learn and understand a new one. We aimed to develop a design pattern that could meet the needs of both smart charging and smart heating.

As we approached a design that we felt confident addressed the challenges, we began testing it. We conducted both internal and external guerrilla testing to gather feedback, and going through several cycles of iterations and improvements on the design.

Post-release reflections
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Our end result both have strenghts and weaknesses. We've gotten great feedback of how we solved our schedule management, but serving adjusting temperature in a instant could be a challenge to solve in future iterations.

Portfolio in progress, more coming ... :)