Infinity Thermostat App

Infinity Thermostat

I led a creative team to design a digital thermostat and app for Infinity, Carrier's premium smart home brand. The goal was to modernize the legacy app and wall controller and bring Carrier to a competitive position in the smart home game. We focused on creating a user-friendly experience for homeowners to install, monitor, and reduce energy consumption.

Carrier Residential needed help to define and design a homeowner mobile app and wall control UI for the Carrier Infinity system. Together with my design team, we redesigned both the app and wall controller to bring Carrier to a competitive position in the smart home game.

As part of the discovery process, I collected competitive research around existing interaction patterns in the space, from dials to sliders. We then interviewed homeowners to understand why certain features were important to them in digital climate controllers. Finally, using prototypes we built, we asked users to complete key tasks, and refined the designs over several rounds of testing.

We had to consider not just Carrier Residential’s homeowner customers, but the dealers as well. We interviewed homeowners to learn their expectations for a thermostat app that's paired with a digital wall controller. The dealers recommend and installed thermostats in homes so we gathered feedback to improve and simplify the installation process.

In order to simplify the flows and make onboarding easier, we wanted to unify the wall controller and the iOS app experiences. So we ensured the interactions, look and feel, and navigation used a common design language across all user journeys.

We created multiple prototypes during several rounds of user testing, iterating designs to ensure users quickly understood the different modes of the app, how to create weekly schedules, and validate an overall intuitive experience.

We also wanted to avoid taking users out of the main controller screen, since that was the app's focus. So we took a card-based approach that allowed menus to slide in with a simple micro-interaction.

We tested user flows on homeowners across the country and in different climates to better understand variations in how customers control their climates.

I made sure my design team established clear and concise design documentation (style guide, component and interaction libraries, prototypes, detailed feature flows), so we could set up engineers and QA for success.

From there, we created a design system, component library and final designs for both the wall controller and mobile app. We also documented our user research, personas and prototypes from our extensive discovery, which was used to help inform the strategy and growth of the smart thermostat team at Carrier.

I also envisioned a light/dark mode hero feature, which aimed to deliver on Infinity's premium promise. I hoped it would also go beyond utility and bring beauty and delight to homeowners' living spaces.

From there, we created a design system, component library and final designs for both the wall controller and mobile app. We also documented our user research, personas and prototypes from our extensive discovery, which was used to help inform the strategy and growth of the smart thermostat team at Carrier.