Overview

Based on the traits of C1C camera and tier3 cities and below market user requirements, we redesigned the smart home app. We focus on middle-aged people who needs to care for elderlies, and our solution is to make the app simpler, easier and more intuitive.

My Involvement

Team

Client

Duration

User Research, A/B Testing,
Lo-fi Prototype, Presentation Slide

Ezviz

Fall 2020 (4 weeks)

As a mainstream securtity smart home brand platform,
Ezviz uses smart hardware, Internet icloud services and other technologies to create a safer, smarter, and more comfortable working and living environment for users. Except users who brought camera for village or store and do not need more functions, other users utilize the following purposes:

Why Elderly?

We chose to build an elderly caring version of C1C design, this specific version will tell the physical condition of the old man, especially under the emergency situation.

Characteristic

Users are middle-aged, be insensitive of technology product, and education level is pretty low in general.

Motivation

Have elderly who are in poor health and have limited mobility at home.

Context

Large families, usually share the camera with the other family members, and check the life of the elderly together.

Parents are at home by themselves, if l have the camera, l know what they were doing and felt safe in my heart

Aunt Yang living in Urumqi who is 48 years old, and most of her brothers and sisters are working hard in other big cities. In the past year, her father were in a poor health. Although the elderly gradually recovered, their children need to work and care the parents at the same time.
‍
Especially for aunt Yang, she felt exhausted physically and mentally when she was busy with work. Lao Zhang, who is in a similar situation with Aunt Yang, recommended that she buy a home camera so that even if she is busy, Aunt Yang and her distant siblings can always check the situation of their parents in Urumqi.

Target users:

Middle-aged people who has elderly people at home and other family members who also care about elderly people are our focused target users.

Ideation

We use “crazy 8” methods to do the early stage brainstorming on two major redesign features, live video and playback.

LIVE VIDEO

Lo-fi Wireframing

Alert message: In response to the needs of target users to observe characters, we separated to display “someone appears” and “picture abnormalities” are, so that users can query related video images by category.

A/B Testing

We separated two main features “live video” and “playback” in one single page into two pages. It serves users better to open the page and interact with the elderly at any time, including at work. There’re two entrances of “playback” function, one in the separate module and another one on the video details page.

Most of users couldn’t operate the cellphone as proficient as our team members. So they really needs more intuitive and easier interaction ways, like tab the rectangles on the phone. Finally, we decided to use option A rather than option B.

LIVE VIDEO

Tap the bottom “Look all day videos” to switch from live video to play back video.

Swipe from left to right to switch between live page and video page.

We changed the design which “live video” and “playback” in one single page, so we decided to put the more frequent feature in a separate page, to meet the needs of users that opens the page and interact with the elderly at any time. The user is confused about that drag zoom axis on the video details page, and won’t chose to click the axis during the operation. We designed option A and option B to do a A/B testing for choosing the better solution. Our team tested 12 users in total. And 9 out of 12 chose the option A. They’re some following reasons:

The flow after confirming to alter from normal version to the ealderly caring version.

The flow includes each function start from the home page like messages, find the video, and edit groups.

Tap the big photo in the middle turn to the live page, and click the button link to video page.

My account page, it’s the fifth navigation bar which contains some personal information.

Design Guide

We refreshed the current design system by customizing the color palette, text style, icons, controls and buttons, and different cards in elderly caring version as well.

01 COLOR

02 TEXT

03 ICON

04 BUTTON

05 CARD

06 CONTROL

07 NAVIGATION BAR

Accessibility

We always keep in mind with accessibility, we tried to consider various types of users refers to the design of products, including vision, hearing, and motor skill disability.

01 Color Contrast

02 Avoid Gesture

03 Colorblindness Friendly

We avoid using the only hand gesture to complete any order, because the gesture can be ambiguous and limited in some special scenarios. For instance, we will use control or button instead of swiping left or right.

We have used color to enhance comprehension, but we didn’t use the color alone to convey information. Because the color blinded people won’t able to distinguish different colors.

Reflection

After our presentation, we received very positive feedback from the PM team of Ezviz China, who later adopted several recommended UX features including search the video, Live/ Playback switch, and alert remainder classification in the next app update. Meanwhile, clients also critiqued our prototype, and we got two areas of directions for next iteration:

Elderly people are also a relatively large user group, which can be further subdivided into a certain type of elderly, like sick and bedridden elderly. We may set a time reminder to the mid-aged user to open the app and watch the life of the elderly at specific time. Or a remainder to take medicine on time.

We will build a new feature which searches specifically to find a certain action of the old man (like the old man was sleeping and then getting up or taking the medicines), it will serve our users in a more convenient way.