The Redesign of Everyday Things

“Where is the temperature on this? What does Cooler or Warmer mean?” — Student, CMU.

Problem: How can we redesign a control such that it considers the user’s intent, context, behavior, environment, and physical limitations appropriately? How can we allow the user to apply knowledge of human perception and create controls that are elegant, intuitive and can be learned easily?

Solution: A control that provides the user with more perceptual affordance, feedforward, and feedback as well as creates a more interactive experience.

The instance of a Thermostat that I chose to improve upon(left); My proposed redesign for its controls(right)

Role — Product Designer | Duration — 4 weeks | Team Members — Individual Project | Coursework — Interaction Design Studio

Background Research

I was assigned to redesign the controls of a thermostat and we had to start off the project by picking an instance of a thermostat, one that did not create a good interaction for its users. The instance that I chose was one that I interacted with regularly in my room at the MHCI Lab.

It did not provide any feedback to the users which was the main pain point. Apart from that, it lacked perceptual affordance which is allowing the user to understand what the control can do or achieve as well as it lacked feedforward which allows the user to perceive the consequences of their actions.

The key insights that I generated from this are:

“Users want feedback on their actions and see the impact that they will have.”

“Users do not want a control that adds to their cognitive load and has a steep learning curve.”

First Iteration

For my first iteration, the potential improvements that I thought of were adding a display for the current temperature, using the slider for temperature control and allowing the user to set the maximum and minimum temperature or the range in which the thermostat can be set.

First Iteration Sketch (left); First Iteration foam core model(right)

I also added an additional feel feature as feedback to the user to feel the temperature that the user may want to set it to. The thermostat was a non-programmable one that is, it didn’t automatically sense the temperature and set it, but instead, the user had to do it themselves.

Feedback: My first iteration did not succeed in meeting the user needs effectively as the design wasn’t intuitive enough and did not provide enough feedforward. The controls also lacked visual coupling and were sparsely placed. Also, the fact that it was a non-programmable thermostat didn’t connect well with the users during the critique session and they felt that programmable thermostats would be more helpful.

The insights I learned from this iteration were,

“You are not the user of your system.”

“Test and iterate more before zeroeing down on one design.”

Second Iteration

To begin with my second iteration, I improved the feedforward and coupling of the device by making the controls link visually with the information they displayed on the screen. I also chose to make it a programmable thermostat and make it a hands-free experience for the users.

I conducted A/B Testing to understand as to what alignment did people prefer for their control and what they thought had better visual coupling and feedforward. I conducted think-alouds with users to understand what problems they had in completing a certain task and also got general feedback about the design and how it was similar or different from their thermostat.

A/B Testing: Positioning of Buttons on the control (left); A/B Testing on the alignment of the control (right)

The following is my second iteration which included better visual feedback, coupling, and uniformity in terms of the controls.

Second Iteration sketch(left) and foam core model(right)

Feedback: The critique that I got on my second iteration was to change the name ‘Sense’ to something more intuitive as it did not convey the meaning clearly. I was also told to show the amount of time it takes to reach the temperature that the user sets it to. Overall, my second iteration was better received than the first one.

These are my insights from the second iteration of the design,

“Conducting think-alouds helps to understand how the users perceive your product and how they react to it.”

“Visual coupling helps to reduce the learning curve and makes it easier to learn how to navigate around the device.”

Final Outcome

The following is the final design that I created and had to ‘pitch’ to my classmates as a product that I had created for a thermostat company.

Screens for different capabilities of the thermostat

Pitch(left); Foam core model of the third iteration(center); Peer Interaction with the control(right)

My key takeaways from this project were that design is an iterative process and one that requires a constant feedback cycle to better inform the next iteration. Redesigning controls based on Norman’s Principles of Design enables users to have better interactions as well as reduce the cognitive load on the user to learn how to use the control.