Ezviz Mobile App Caring Mode

Overview

Ezviz is a leading smart home devices company in China known for its brand identity centering home security. Our prompt is to design for tier-3 city* users of C1C indoor home camera, one of its entry level products within Ezviz’s huge and complex ecosystem of connected smart home devices.

Team

4 Designers/Researchers

My Contribution

I led:
- User voices research
- Current interfaces walkthrough and analysis
- Information architecture redesign
- Style guide creation
- High fidelity interfaces about notifications

The Problem

The current Ezviz App serves as the central control hub for all Ezviz products. However, many C1C camera users who use it to monitor their parents or elderly at home only use features relevant to them, whereas advanced and premium features complex use flows adds to their mental load make it harder for these users to accomplish what they want to do.

Our Solution

We designed a special version of the App, Caring Mode, to be triggered when a C1C is connected. Based on user research, we simplified the flow and prioritized relevant features of the App according to their needs and wants.

How Did We Get Here?

User Research

• Desktop Research

• Online User Voices

• User Interviews

1. What do people use Ezviz cameras for?

According to our research as well as feedback from clients, watching pets and watching children are common in Tier 1-3 cities. Therefore, we decided to focus on watching elderly at home as our use case.

2. Who are our users? What do they need?

According to our client, a large group of C1C users are middle age population living in Tier 3-4 cities.

We interviewed three 50+ years old home camera users who use it to monitor elderly at home.

Insights

1. The most frequently used feature are watching the camera recording live and talking to elderly through the camera.

2. Users occasionally search through video history when told something happened on a specific day and time.

3. Users want to be able to share the live camera with family members.

Persona

Current Information Architecture of The App

Redesigned Information Architecture

Interactive Prototype

Client Feedback and Our Impact

1. Our client liked our prioritization of display and access of notification, as well as the redesign of the scrolling bar to show saved video clips.

2. More usability testing could have been done to find out if icons, layouts, interactions are intuitively understandable for our target users.

3. Our client were unable to share marketing data like what percentage of users only used entry-level devices like C1C, so we could not directly validate the value of and compare tradeoffs brought by our design. However, we later found out that Caring Mode was implemented on the Ezviz App, featuring a similar design that centered around simplified user flow and prioritized essential functions for users with simple goals (shown on the right).

What I learned:

1. User research under limited resources and limited time is hard yet very common, but not impossible.

With only 3 weeks to work on the project, we had to rely on desktop research, online user voices, experts review, and discounted user interviews to gather insights in our user research phase. While this was not ideal, we realized that it was important to learn what users need and want in order to select a feasible project scope. Looking back, adopting mixed methods quickly was key to staying on track for the later parts of the project.

2. Collaborating remotely has its pros and cons- how to leverage them is key.

Our 4 team members lived in 3 different time zones across China and the US, and I was even doing a full time internship at the time. This made it difficult for all of us to meet online at the same time. Therefore, we strategized each of our tasks so that by the time one member started working on their part, another member had already finished the preceding part. We also kept communication super clear so that no one felt disconnected although we had never seen each other. This was also my first time being part of a remote group project, and it definitely proved my assumptions about inefficient remote group work wrong. Being one of the members in China, I also volunteered to purchase a C1C device and to walk through steps to use it to provide contexts, as well as talking to store associates to gather extra insights.

If We Had More Time

If we had more time, we would have spent more time on usability tests by recruiting more target users and digging deeper into the reason behind any preference or behavior.