Claire heads up service and UX design at AlertMe, the leading UK innovator in smart home services named Wired magazine’s top UK startup of 2012. She has worked in UX design and research for 15 years for companies such as Razorfish, Flow Interactive and Fjord.
Since beginning her career designing for graceful degradation in Netscape 2, she has cheered along as the web has broken free of the desktop, screens have become both smaller and bigger, and services have emerged spanning multiple devices, some without screens at all.
Her key interest is in ubiquitous computing for the mundane objects and activities that make up our daily lives. The field of the internet of things is heavily technology driven, and we are just beginning to understand what humane design for mass market audiences might look like.
“Siri, did I leave the oven on?”
The idea of the connected home has been around for 40 years or more, but has never taken off as a mass market proposition. But this is changing. Mainstream retailers are starting to bringing out connected home hardware and services to help consumers understand and control their energy use and heating, secure their homes, know who’s in and out, be alerted to any emergencies and generally feel reassured that everything’s OK at home. It will soon be normal to turn lights and appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set your burglar alarm over the web.
UX is key to turning this interesting niche technology into a mass market success. But the home is a challenging environment: it’s often a shared space inhabited by different people with different needs and goals, and it’s our refuge from the world: the last place any of us want to feel overwhelmed by technology.
In this talk, I’ll cover: