Design development

Introduction

The design process started on day one, and continued through every phase of the development of the platform – and still continues to be an integrated part of our development.

We will briefly touch upon some of the key components of the interface and design process and hopefully give you a little bit of an insight into why it looks and works the way it does.

In the beginning

We approached the development with a large amount of curiosity and we were conscious not to bring any pre-conceived ideas. We just knew that we wanted to produce something highly usable, highly attractive and highly intuitive which no one had done before.

We wanted to pursue an organic development process; to design the interface from the ground-up, and essentially work everything out for ourselves. This meant a very substantial consideration of the ways in which people would interact with the system, what they’d want and how they’d end up using it. Wisely or foolishly we also developed the system in absolute isolation; it wasn’t until the end of the design process that we allowed ourselves a look at competing systems. That means that the Promoveo system looks and works differently from the others – we think it looks and works better.

Although we knew that the technology that was going to power the Promoveo Platform would allow us to execute pretty much anything we needed from it, we took a decision early on to only incorporate design features where they’d bring benefit – we kept naff and pointless visual gimmicks out.

We then set about working out how we’d want the features to work, and developing a design with strong emphasis on aesthetics and visuals. If we got it right we knew that it may end up literally on people's walls.

A million tiny glowing pixels

We recognised that no matter how beautifully designed a light switch is, it is still just a light switch – it’s a physical, mechanical thing and this was what we were going to be replacing. We knew that part of what we had to account for was a transition from the old to the new; we were going to be connecting a series of disparate and hitherto disconnected devices around the house, and replacing or augmenting their existing largely-mechanical controls with a million tiny touch-sensitive glowing pixels.

Further an energy meter previously being hidden away in the basement was suddenly to be displayed on the wall in your living room. That put completely new requirements into play in terms of moving from the purely functional to functionality combined with the best design.

This is unusually not designery waffle; it’s a serious consideration – how far do you take things; take things too far and it won’t feel real. We had to enforce a level of design-scepticism; our initial pitch was based on what we now refer to as ‘the floating sphere’ concept but once we got into the design process it become clear that we were going to need to be careful not to develop too ‘soft’ a system. The ‘floating spheres’ were out, and a level of ‘hardness’ was in; an interface that was too far-out would lose its real-world meaning and make it harder for people to relate to the things they wanted to do with their homes.

Redefining the home

Looking back, one of the great strengths of the interface is its information architecture. If you’ve already read our guide to our design principles you’ll know that we were trying to produce a very low-geek solution where you would always know where you are and achieving what you want within seconds.

We set out to develop a 1-2-3 control based interface, in other words touch, touch, touch and there’s the control, this sounds sensible but can you imagine showing the system off to your friends with a typical IT design? “Look I can turn the lights up in this room by first selecting the menu screen, then selecting lighting controls, then kitchen lighting controls, then adjusting the level of each of the table lamps”. Unless you work in an IT department we didn’t think your friends would be very impressed.

We challenged ourselves to find a usable and accessible way of reducing the number of touches – to flatten the hierarchy and make it a less IT-ish solution. So we structured the system around the home – users would select room first then device, rather than device, then room. It sounds simple but it meant that through the use of frequently-used controls on a room screen we could potentially reduce the number of touches to one. Thus it would be touch, control – simpler, quicker and more intuitive and better connected to the home the user would recognise.

The end

We wanted to produce an interface that people could use easily, where no instruction manual was necessary and where people would want to welcome it into their lives and homes. This is an ongoing process around what Promoveo is about – improving people’s life through innovation, where an innovative design is at the core.

We think we have achieved our goals but you’ll need to decide for yourselves.

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