How Mobile ethnography helped a home-heating company to design a smart-home heating control system.

As technology becomes ever more powerful and intuitive, it is playing an increasingly large part in how we manage our homes. One area of the home which has seen particular advancements is in heating. Previously, consumers had little control over the time, frequency and temperature of heating when they were not present in their homes. However, with the advancement of smart-homes systems, they can now remotely control the heating in their homes from their smartphones.

The Challenge

As technology has continued to develop at a rapid pace, smart-home technology has been one area that has advanced quicker than many had ever predicted. Whilst this has been a positive for consumers, such rapid development has meant that little is known about consumers’ adoption, expectations, requirements or usage of such technology.

This was exactly the challenge facing our client when they approached us here at Indeemo. Their own client had recently developed a smart-heating control app as part of their home-heating services.

Whilst the company was confident that they had developed a convenient app, they were unsure about how the user experience of this new technology would be for their customers. Furthermore, they weren’t entirely sure of which of their customers would be willing to adopt such technology.

In order to understand just how they should be designing the app, they needed to get some real-life feedback on its everyday application from a representative sample of their customers.

The Goals

Our clients’ objectives were to:

Gain a deeper insight into their consumer’s attitudes, behaviors, and usage with regards to their home-heating service
Understand the motivations and expectations of consumers when it came to smart-heating controls
Gather in-the-moment feedback on the user experience of the new smart-heating app amongst their customers

100 Respondents

5 Tasks

7 Months

Tasking Strategy: Scheduled Tasking

The Solution

When our client approached us, we identified a familiar problem. Understanding the user's experience of on-the-go apps can be difficult. Whilst bringing consumers to focus groups, IDI’s and product testings can garner instant feedback, it does not always truly reflect the natural, on-the-go and in the moment usage of the app.

Working with Indeemo, our client was able to conduct a mobile ethnography project that would get the in-the-moment, in-context insights into the user experience of their app that they needed. Using a scheduled task list, they gathered almost 2000 uploads from 50 respondents giving media-rich feedback on their experience and satisfaction with the app.

Indeemo’s Mobile Screen-Recording feature allowed our client to see exactly how customers were using the app, whilst also explaining exactly what they were doing and experiencing as they controlled their home heating with it. This feedback allowed our client to fully understand this user experience from a large sample of their consumers as they continued to use the app.

If you would like to learn more about how design ethnography can help you understand the user experience of an app or mobile-service, please get in touch.

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Indeemo is a tool utilized by Experience Designers and User Researchers for conducting diary studies and observational research, covering a wide range of topics from online shopping behavior to business travel and transportation, as well as unique experiences and convenience store snack purchases.

Clients in the Research and Design fields repeatedly comment on the richness and depth of insights they are able to gather through the use of Mobile Ethnography.

The capability of analyzing contextual video from multiple respondents on a unified platform streamlines the process of data analysis and synthesis, significantly increasing researcher efficiency.