04Case study

Equinox & My Home

Founding Legrand’s first UX team and shipping smart-home control across in-wall touchscreens, iOS and Android.

Company: Legrand / Vantage Controls
My role: Lead User Experience Designer
Scope: Research, UI & UX design, visual design, customer testing
Years: 2012–2019

AContext

A team that didn’t exist yet

I founded and built Legrand’s first UX team, setting the foundation for user-centered design across the organization. We worked with product and engineering in agile environments, hands-on from discovery through delivery, across multiple 0→1 applications in home automation.

BEquinox · 2013

Full custom home automation

Equinox had to work on iOS, Android and the in-wall controller. We designed around three things customers told us:

Keep it simple. I need it to be easy to control my home automation.
Let me play. I would like to customize the features of my system.
Grow with me. Let me add devices with ease and not have to call an installer.

Equinox principles: keep it simple, let me play, grow with me — **FIG. 01**The three principles, as presented to the team.

Keypads, touchscreens and mobile apps share one graphical interface, and home tiles let people control features directly from the top level.

Equinox tiles for lighting, scenes, climate, weather, shades and timers — **FIG. 02**Home tiles: lighting, scenes, climate, weather, shades, timers.

Equinox in-wall touchscreen showing climate and scenes — **FIG. 03**The in-wall controller.

Equinox won the Design for Experience award from UX Magazine as a complex cross-platform product. Controlling features from the home tiles was the forward-thinking piece that put it on the podium.

CMy Home · 2017

Easy-to-use home automation

A simpler app for Legrand’s lighting products: on/off and dimming, shades up/down/stop, security and cameras, with timers, multi-location control and mood scenes from the home screen.

My Home app screens for rooms, automation and scenes — **FIG. 04**My Home on iOS: rooms, automations and scenes.

DWhat I learned

The call I’d push harder on

I advised the team that we should plan for third-party hardware. I was heard, but it wasn’t Legrand’s standard at the time. The app launched successfully and worked great with Legrand hardware. Shortly after, Alexa arrived, cheaper hardware flooded the market, and DIY automation took off.

We also explored an Apple Watch version and cut it: the screen was too small and most users didn’t care to have it on their wrist. Knowing what not to ship is part of the job.