Building for the Home. And Designing for the People & Families Who Live There.
By Matt R.
Nest set out to tackle difficult problems with simple, effective technology. We started with energy consumption and the thermostat, which controls heating and cooling systems — generally the largest source of energy usage in the home. Today, the Nest Learning Thermostat has been invited into millions of homes and saved billions of kilowatt hours of energy. And while hardware and software engineering were key to reinventing the thermostat, the intuitive, human user experience we created has proven crucial, too.
Creating thoughtful interactions that resonate with all of Nest’s users requires deep partnership between our Engineering & Design teams. Both teams understand and appreciate the significant technical challenges. Each keeps the users we’re serving at the center of our work. Most of our engineering achievements have a companion design story, and vice versa.
For example, you’ve read about the technical challenges we faced when building Sightline: making 100 GB of video history load quickly using a thumbnail video stream we call Scrubby Stream. But this technical challenge was the second part of our team’s innovation. It was the result of solving a fundamental, customer-based, design challenge.
When the Sightline team began development, the first design challenge we faced was daunting. How could we build an experience contained within a mobile device that allowed homeowners to intuitively traverse 10-to-30 days of 24/7 video coverage? That’s up to 720 hours of footage. And beyond that, how do we call attention to the events that are actually interesting amidst hours of footage?
Our teams kicked around a lot of ideas — from calendars to lists of events — before we finally landed on the core of Sightline: A vertical representation of events, allowing users to easily scrub through their enormous video history. You can move your finger slowly along the events, and the video advances slowly to mirror your interaction, tracking your place in time. Scroll quickly, and you can get through your video in no time at all.
When Nest Cam notices something it thinks you’d like to know about, the thumbnail of the event appears in the corresponding place on your timeline. This design allows users to digest a lot of information without breaking a sweat.
When I first saw the design team’s proposal, I was incredibly impressed. It was so natural that I couldn’t imagine a simpler way to interact with that quantity of data. The team went on to share the proposal with the product engineers, who were inspired to come up with amazingly innovative Scrubby Stream, enabling us to process massive amounts and bringing the design idea to life.
This level of collaboration around shared challenges between design and engineering is indicative of what makes Nest — and the experiences we build for users — so special.
That’s just one of the innovative experiences that our incredible designers have built. Ever wonder how Nest designed the voice of Protect, our smoke and CO detector, before voice interactions were popular? Or how we chose which thermostat interface features to develop for our iconic Learning Thermostat? How has Nest built and maintained the iconic aesthetic of our product line? I’m excited for our team to share posts from Nest’s designers here on “Building for the Home.” These folks are working hard to shape our technological advancements into approachable and delightful interactions. We’ve accumulated plenty of stories and insights over the last seven years. We’re excited to share that work with you. I hope you’ll continue to stop by to read more about them.
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The information contained in this blog is provided only as general information for educational purposes, and may or may not be up to date. The information is provided as-is with no warranties. This blog is not intended to be a factual representation of how Nest’s products and services actually work. No license is granted under any intellectual property rights of Nest, Google, or others.
