Gebwell Smart - A step up in smart home heating

Designing an app for controlling geothermal heating.

Goal

Gebwell is Finland's leading company in environmentally friendly heating and cooling of buildings, most known for their geothermal solutions.

However, in 2013 they were in risk of falling behind their their competitors in IoT and smart home realms. Competitors were developing mobile applications which allowed their customers to remotely control their home heating.

To retain their competitive edge, Gebwell wanted to develop a solution that would introduce more attractive services to customers but also boost company's after-market sales.

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To comply with non-disclosure agreements, I have omitted or altered any confidential information about the project.

CLIENT

Gebwell

YEAR

2013

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

a designer and two external developers

MY ROLE

service design, UX/UI design, developer handoff

TOOLS

Balsamiq, Illustrator, Protopie

USERS

consumers and housing company technicians

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The work

Workshopped with Gebwell team to flesh out original service features such as remote support, weather and exchange price optimization. These would create an edge over the competitors, and with it significant profit potential.
Created alternatives on the styling and theming of the application
Designed user flows, starting from the minimal features such as adjusting heating and water temperature, setting heating schedules and managing heating circuits
Planned feedback questionaires for pilot customers on the designs, with the goal of understanding what features they were most interested in
Designed features for service addons, technical support and equipment diagnostics
Created user interface specifications for developers, including interactions, style guides and animations

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Takeaways

After building my earlier career on industrial design, this was my first software-only project. It taught me several fundamental lessons:

Always pursue user research and validation. The disadvantages of missing out on it are larger than the initial research costs.
The balance between user expections and realistic development effort is delicate. As such, 'definition of done' should always be tied to user value.
The handoff of design specifications needs to be planned together with developers. Otherwise scope changes and delays in development are a near certainty.