Connect all of your home automation devices in one single app.

Aerie is an iOS app that empowers users to get unified access to all smart home devices to control, monitor, and secure their home from anywhere in one app.

long-standing incoherent experiences

Disparate communication standards among different IoT ecosystems required users to install the corresponding mobile apps to manage specific smart home devices. Dealing with various apps alongside incoherent user experiences was an ever-present tedium in IoT industry.

Challenge

In a two-month time bound in Spring 2017. We set our goal to help homeowners manage and control multiple home automation devices with a coherent user experience in one single app. Aside from sticking with the primary goal, we took this as an opportunity to get our hands dirty on building a native iOS app (Swift) pairing up with a 3D printed doorbell device (C++ with ESP8266) from the ground up, making them able to communicate with each other.

Role

Along with conducting market & user research with the team, my responsibilities included conceptualization, UI/UX design, and the iOS app development, which was to make the 3D-printed doorbell able to communicate with the signal lights.

Breaking down the big goal into actionable tasks

• Enable automation devices to work together without going through an intermediary hub.
• Design consistent visual elements for smart home devices with common user experience patterns.
• Allow users to control multiple devices from the iOS app.

The constraints

Building an interoperable ecosystem for smart home devices to interconnect is the most efficient way for the IoT industry; it would not only aid developers and IoT companies in doing a better collaboration but also benefit the end consumers, in turn having more dynamic automated services.

We realized that was a can of worms and that it wasn't worth our time because of the limited time frame, so we moved on to tinkering and experimenting with our 3D-printed doorbell to familiarize ourselves with how an app and a smart doorbell intercommunicate first. Then we followed the storyboard we set to make the doorbell and hue light bulbs interconnect.