Providing homeowners and business owners with tools to prevent water damage in their buildings
An incumbent plumbing company had a desire to enter the smart home/IoT space with was a smart water monitoring system.
- Role
- Designer
- Year
- 2019
Approach
We conducted a competitive analysis and ethnographies to map the user experience and identify opportunities to improve on an existing design.
Result
The final output was a list of 13 prioritized recommendations for the digital and industrial product. Lessons : This was a really hard project in terms of understanding how to communicate bad news to a client (E.g. the investment they want to make will not pay off). We broke some hearts during this project, and ultimately someone lost their job. I learned a lot about how to frame findings in a productive way, rather than highlighting the flaws of a system alone. There is a time and place for human-centered design, but sometimes all you need is good industrial design to improve an existing product and to fix obvious problems.