Liberty
Mutual

Situation

While working with Liberty Mutual as the Lead UI/UX Designer in their innovation department, we had the opportunity to partner with multiple smart-home device manufacturers and develop a new application. We decided on the goal of designing an application that will allow different smart-home devices to communicate and work together in a user’s home.

Task

Our task was to create an application that can detect and connect to different smart-home devices and then allow the user to control and automate those devices through a single interface. This would require the application to communicate with a variety of smart-home devices, each of which may have its unique communication protocol.

Action

To accomplish this task, me and my team took the following actions:

1. Researched and identified the most commonly used smart-home devices and their communication protocols, prioritizing our partnered products. This would ensure that the application is compatible with the devices the user will most likely have in their home.
2. Designed a user interface that allows users to easily add and connect to their smart-home devices. The interface needed to be intuitive and straightforward so the user could easily navigate and control their devices.
3. Developed a back-end system that could communicate with the different smart-home devices using their respective protocols. This would require using appropriate libraries and frameworks to handle the communication with each device.
4. Tested the application to ensure that it could detect and connect to different smart-home devices and that the user could control and automate those devices through the application. This will involve setting up a test environment with various smart-home devices and verifying that the application can detect and control them as intended.

Result

The result of these actions should have been an application that would allow the user to easily connect and control their smart-home devices through a single interface. With our partnered companies being on board, it should have been a home run. Unfortunately, with so many projects being developed then, priorities did not allow us to fully realize this application. I am still very proud of the creation our team of researchers, developers, and myself created, even if the application never saw the light of day.