ThermoTouch

Time: Aug. 2011
Team: Hongyuan Jiang
Role: Interview, Secondary research, Paper prototyping, Usability testing, Digital Prototyping
Design Methods: Affinity diagramming, Personas, Design sketches, Design ideation, Paper prototyping, Digital prototyping
Tools: Photoshop, InDesign

Overview

ThermoTouch was a design for future thermostats intended to solve the problem of energy waste caused by users' misunderstanding and misuses of the device. The results of interviews and researches indicated that most users think raising or lowering temperature to extreme levels on a thermostat would change the real temperature quickly. However, thermostats actually function in a constant speed. Setting desired temperatures too high or too low would only make the real temperature deviate from a comfortable level. When it happened, users needed to readjust the temperature to the desired level again, during which unnecessary energy consumption occurred.

Design Process

First, we did interviews to figure out how common users interpreted the interface of traditional thermostats, and how thermostats actually function. Utilizing the personas we developed and integrating sketches we generated, we designed our first-version thermostat, creating a paper prototype to conduct 4 usability tests. Based on the results, we adjusted our product in terms of color expression and temperature indication and generated our final design by Photoshop.

Final Concept

ThermoTouch has an interactive touchscreen interface. People could change the room temperature simply by swiping gestures. After the desired temperature was set, people could see the change of current temperature on the touch screen little by little as the time went by. In the meanwhile, the remaining time to achieve the desired temperature would be shown by the light signals on the right side of the screen. The light signals would display different colors as the gap between current temperature and desired temperature became wider, which warned the users of energy waste. We intended to let users understand that it would take longer if they made wider changes on the temperature. In other words, wider changes of temperature won't make room temperatures change faster but will only consume more energy.

1) Lowering temperature to a desired level.

2) Raising temperature to a desired level.