Smart Home Control

The Hisense Smart Home App provides full control for a huge variety of smart devices, all with a simple remote and an easy to use interface.

My Role

Director of Product Design, Product Owner, Project Lead, Interaction Design Contributor

The Challenge

The Goal

In an ever competitive market, new features needed to be consistently added. With smart devices taking off in China, it was a the right time to include Smart Home functionality. Controlling a wide range of devices with a DPAD, and staying on top of new devices being added at an accelerated rate were key challenges to be overcome.

To create a Smart Home application that allowed for complete control and monitoring of every smart device in the home while always being up to date without the need of costly (and risky) software updates.

The Design

Like all the apps we designed for TV use, this one needed to adhere to a simple Interaction model optimized for a DPAD.

To maximize efficiency it needed to provide quick access to key actions and information.

The smart device ecosystem was far more mature and expansive in China versus North America at the time. To maximize usefulnes we needed to be capable of supporting a huge number of existing smart devices, and be scalable and flexible enough to support the dynamic addition of new devices without requiring a software update.

Using a similar approach to one I had devised for our VOD platform earlier, we went with a template based system. New devices could be supported at any time by simply providing the appropriate template on the cloud without any changes occurring on the local TV.

This flexibility was achieved by providing a robust library of templates and components that were designed for maximum scalability.

Simple and efficient reusable patterns were created to simplify development as well as the user experience.

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Flexible templates could easily be adapted based on simple data sets allowing new devices to be added without a need to update the software.

To ensure simple usability as well as deal with potential latency issues an interactive motion simulation was created to validate design decisions as well as guide development.

The Result

VIDAA Smart Home was included on millions of VIDAA TVs starting in 2016. The list of supported devices has continued to grow and the feature set has expanded to include voice control.