Safe Home
Researched and Designed the Safe home, a mobile application which is used to quickly adjust the IoT devices privacy as well as create and assign customized user and home profiles inside household spaces.
“Design a platform where user can quickly adjust the privacy settings of the individual IoT device and can control the overall home privacy in various household situations with various user personas”
My Role
User Experience Designer & Researcher
Timeline
Sep 2022 - Nov 2022
Team
Shashank (Myself)
Tools
Design
Collaboration
Slack, MIRO
Figma
Overview
In todays world, the growing space of IoT carries several benefits, as it will change the way people carry out everyday tasks and potentially transform the world. Also, with the increase in the IoT devices day by day, the multi application usage is another issue to be tackled.
In todays world, the growing space of IoT carries several benefits, as it will change the way people carry out everyday tasks and potentially transform the world.
THE PROBLEM
What is it about?
Safe Home is an application to manage the privacy of the IoT devices inside household spaces. After all the iterations and improves, this is the final prototype.
THE SOLUTION
Final Prototype
RESEARCH
Studied the competitors
Although there are no direct competitors for managing your privacy inside household spaces, but there are lots of privacy management applications in various spaces like outdoors, mobile operating systems(android and IOS).
Design Opportunities
After analyzing the data, I identified four major problems that the users are currently facing and wanted to solve them with a design solution.
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Having a smart home is undoubtedly cool and will draw a cool factor from your guests, but for example, what if your Alexa starts playing your meeting calendar during your guests visit?
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Most of the companies that manufacture/design the IoT devices track users data in the name of research purposes and might be a bait to data leak(Ex: Facebook Analytica).
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Furthermore, for majority of the regular users, the data usage has become a part of life due to lack of awareness and control.
There will be 64 billion IoT devices by 2025
33% of privacy activists responded that they could not protect their privacy.
- Insider Intelligence
- technews.com
User Interviews
I drafted a script and conducted semi-structured interviews with 5 participants. We asked them for details about their privacy knowledge, issues and how they tried to protect their privacy incase of various required scenarios.
Working backward to find the root cause of the problems.
How well the existing privacy features are helping
What users prefer incase of he household privacy
"The interviews with the users revealed a fact that they weren't much exposed to the privacy with the IoT devices. Also, with the multiple IoT devices within the household spaces, they had to manage multiple UI's which made a sense in disconnect with the learning curve due to high cognitive load and lack of single platform to manage is making it even effecting it more."
01
02
03
04
Task creation/management
Awareness
Misslaneous
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Usage restrictions
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Device/apps management
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Guest data management
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Routine data management
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Task knowledge
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Data knowledge
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All other data related to privacy
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Device management
User Personas
I received a lot of information from interviews. To help me better understand the users and their pain points, I came up with personas. Personas helped me keep target users in mind and their pain points throughout the design process.
User Journey Map
I received a lot of information from interviews. To help me better understand the users and their pain points, I came up with personas. Personas helped me keep target users in mind and their pain points throughout the design process.
HOW MIGHT WE?
01
Can't control the data
4/5 users have mentioned that they know something is going behind their devices but don't know how to control it nor they they know what is being tracked or used for.
02
Repetitive Tasks
Setting and removing the permissions or data tracking for kids/teens in the home is pretty frustrating. 2/5 users mentioned about it.
03
Customization and Routines
Almost all the participants had minimum of 1 or more tasks in a day that they set/ customize based on their needs(something that can be related to routines).
04
Quick control of privacy
3/5 users in the interviews mentioned one or the other situation where they felt a need of quick access to control the devices
To create a feature which shows the list of IoT devices and their live status.
Design Implementation
Profile management for easy and quick access for permissions.
Design Implementation
User profiles to manage customization of access on a regular basis.
Design Implementation
Quick switch feature to change the privacy with one click.
Design Implementation
Story Boards
After ideating the design opportunities, given huge number of scenarios in household spaces, I have created story boards to help visualize how the design opportunities help in solving these situations.
01
Persona :
Scenario :
User's Best Friend
Need to gain access for bedroom TV for entertainment
02
Persona :
Scenario :
Maintenance Guy
Need to gain access of camera to repair it
The privacy can be quickly adjusted for all the associated apps/devices
Quick switch
Privacy shown based on the type of usage (voice/location etc)
Privacy usage
Privacy can be accessed either through map or categories which further can be drilled down.
Digital Map
1. Jumbo Privacy
3. Mobile Privacy dashboard
2. IoT assistant
THE SYNTHESIS
After the interview data is collected, I mapped out the affinity diagram to understand on what aspects majority of the issues were arising.
Privacy Management/Tracking
Once the data is segregated, I then mapped these clustered groups under major themes and what it contains on a summarized level:
Affinity Mapping
03
Persona :
Scenario :
Home Owner
Address the multiple requests when there is a family party at home
CONCEPT GENERATION
Ideation
Using the created design opportunities in the previous stage(data analysis), I thought of all uniques ways to approach the problem and started ideating various ways on those opportunities for feasible solutions. Converted the sketches into the low-fi wireframes.
Concept 1
Privacy Profiles Page
This page contains all the profiles for both home and users. Helps in viewing and editing the profiles as per the need.
SOLUTION
High - Fidelity Mockups
After I have finished the wireframes, I then proceeded to high fidelity mockups. The design language that I choose must be easy and go with the present trend ie dark mode.
Onboarding
This flow shows the user onboarding the app where he setups the home and the IoT devices.
Changing home profile
This flow shows the user changing the home profile to "party" mode incase of house party.
This flow shows the user creating a user profile and customizing it according to the need of the persona
Privacy Management Page
This page contains all the stats and data consumption details of the devices.
Adjusting Privacy
This flow shows the user changing the privacy before attending his confidential meeting.
Creating Privacy Profile
This flow shows how the owner can create a user profile for customized privacy access of the devices in the home.
Assigning Privacy Profile
This flow shows how the owner assigns the profile to nanny who visits the home on regular basis.
Concept 2
After ideating both the concepts, I have tested the concept ideas with the users to get to know if i'm still aligning with what users are thinking. This made me improve on the concepts. Below is the feedback summarized:
01
Profile management is complicated
The profile management ie creating and editing is more complicated. Can be reduced to simpler steps.
02
Homes with more rooms are not easily accessible
Bigger homes with more rooms have more IoT devices leading to more settings which take too long to adjust the privacy.
03
Visually manageable rules and settings would be better
Given, in case of more IoT devices, it would be easy to maneuver through digital map to access the devices and manage their settings for various personas in various scenarios.
Feedback
Adjusting individual device setting
This flow shows the user changing the setting of an individual device and not the entire room or whole house.
Creating and assigning customized user profile
Thank you for reading!
THINKING BEYOND...
What could be incorporated
Due to the limitation in time, I addressed all the major issues that help the users. I also thought of additional features that can help manage the privacy of the user with more ease and also help with the edge cases in profile management.
01
Profile conflicts
One of the main things that I am gonna concentrate on is resolving the home and user profile conflicts. This might be a tricky situation but definitely a needed one.
02
Clustered device groups
Since the device count keeps increasing, there should be a way the user should be able to see a group of devices for a particular room rather than everything appearing all the time.
03
Improvised device settings
Since there will a lot of variety of devices related to the privacy, the device settings should be common and understandable to certain extent. So that the user might not feel it way too different when he interacts with one.
RETROSPECT
My Key Takeaways
01
Prioritization
During the project, with the weekly feedbacks from the professors and peers, it gets difficult to choose upon what to work and what not to. So, prioritizing them was one thing I always used to do.
02
Assumptions
Assumptions and beliefs are definetly reduced. I can say this for sure because, I started relying more on the data than before. Assumptions always make you go side track in your project, cause these assumptions are still some unrelated problems that just divert your users needs.
03
Keep Iterating
As a designer, I always iterate only in the design stage of the project. But, I have learned that every step can iterative but very useful for major steps like a poster or video which in my case made a huge and impactful difference.
Poster presentation
As a part of the final capstone presentation, I have designed this poster which summarizes my project.
