FROM ENTERPRISE BACKBONE TO Consumer Living Room
The strategic opportunity: adapt enterprise-grade technical depth for the consumer smart-home market and compete directly with established platforms. The challenge was twofold, the existing B2B UX assumed expertise and optimized for configuration depth over daily usability, while the consumer space was crowded with frictionless, polished experiences.
We couldn't simply port an enterprise app; the product philosophy needed a complete rethink. My mandate: lead end-to-end UX from market research and competitive analysis through IA, interaction design, and large-group stakeholder presentations with a cross-functional team of 15+.
UNDERSTANDING THE Consumer Mindset
Enterprise users tolerate friction. Consumer users abandon it. Before designing a single screen, the team needed to understand what the smart-home customer actually valued and where the current market left needs unmet. Research ran in parallel with competitive analysis to move quickly without losing depth.
"Consumer lighting users interact with their app 10–20 times per day. Every extra tap is not an inconvenience, it's attrition. The daily control experience had to reach near-zero friction, even if that meant hiding 80% of the system's capability behind progressive disclosure."
A structured analysis across five primary competitors revealed a clear white space: no platform combined professional-grade mesh reliability with consumer-grade simplicity. This product could own the premium intersection.
| Platform | Setup | Mesh | Circadian | Multi-Home | Pro Role | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lutron Caséta | ◐ Moderate | ✓ Excellent | ◐ Basic | ✗ | ✓ | Premium |
| Philips Hue | ✓ Excellent | ◐ Good | ✓ Good | ✗ | ✗ | Mid–High |
| Google Home | ✓ Excellent | ✗ Unreliable | ◐ Basic | ◐ Limited | ✗ | Low |
| Amazon Alexa | ✓ Good | ✗ Variable | ◐ Basic | ◐ Limited | ✗ | Low |
| Control4 | ✗ Complex | ✓ Excellent | ✓ Advanced | ✓ | ✓ | Very High |
| This Work SMART LIGHTING | ✓ Designed for | ✓ Auto Mesh | ✓ Full | ✓ Multi-Home | ✓ PRO Role | Premium |
A VISUAL SYSTEM BUILT FOR Low-Light Use
The color system wasn't aesthetic-first, it was functionally driven. Lighting apps are used at night, in dim rooms, often on the way to bed. Every decision was evaluated against low-light legibility, touch-target contrast, and the need to communicate system state at a glance without reading.
Dark purple (#3D415E) for all control and action screens; light grey for all settings and configuration. Users always knew whether they were in daily-use mode or configuration mode, without reading a single label.
A dark-first theme reduces eye strain after sunset and makes the warm amber glow of active lights pop as a meaningful status signal. Active lights appear as warm amber dots; inactive lights are grey, readable in peripheral vision, no label required.
A persistent bottom nav, Light Control, Scenes, Activities, Areas, visible at all times. No back stacks, no hamburger menus. Smart-home apps are used one-handed, in low light, mid-task; navigation had to be positionally predictable and always-visible.
Opened 10–20× a day. Built for speed and muscle memory.
Everything needed should be reachable in one tap; everything configuration-related hidden until explicitly sought. Try it tap a room to expand its zones, tap any power button to toggle.
Early prototypes used a drill-down pattern (tap area → new screen). User testing showed disorientation, people lost track of what other areas were doing. The accordion keeps the whole home visible at all times, making state comparison trivial and eliminating back-navigation entirely.
The most frequent action, turning a room off, must never require opening a detail screen. Both area-level and zone-level rows carry an on/off toggle and dim indicator. This doubled the control surface but reduced the task to a single tap for ~90% of daily interactions.
Three color pathways for three user types
A full RGB picker for tinkerers, a curated swatch grid for the impatient, and white-temperature (1800K–6000K) for purists. Tap to switch the path.
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How do you hand BLE mesh configuration to someone who's never heard of BLE?
Core insight: users don't need to understand the technology if they can read the map. Node colors required zero explanation, black = active repeater, white = stable relay, red = reliability problem. But the real question was how much decision-making to ask of a homeowner. We proposed four models. Click through them.
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| Proposal | Approach | Decision Load | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 · Node Map | Live mesh viz, drag-to-repeater | High, manual node selection | DROPPED Too intimidating |
| P2 · Clusters | Proximity-based device grouping | Medium, group-level decisions | DROPPED Still exposed topology |
| P3 · Virtual Groups | User-defined criteria groups | Medium, still per-device | DROPPED Increased commissioning time |
| P4 · Auto Select | System chooses optimal repeaters | Zero, one confirm tap | SHIPPED ✓ Engineering validated |
The same logical map scales from a 32-device condo to a 247-device estate, the system creates groups and subnets, then assigns repeaters automatically. Example: 247 devices, 66 repeaters, 22 subnets created.
Configure the home before a single fixture is mounted.
NFC tags let users scan a device still in its box, assign it to a room, and name it, building a complete logical map of the home before the electrician installs anything. Step through the QR / NFC flow.
Naming was embedded in setup, not deferred to settings, because post-setup renaming rates were extremely low in comparable products. If users didn't name during commissioning, they never would, leaving them with "IRiS Color Bulb 1" forever. Forcing the moment increased permanent naming adoption significantly.
Multi-home control and a circadian engine that knows when the sun sets.
A differentiating capability unavailable in basic consumer competitors: multiple properties from a single account, three role types, and scheduling driven by real sunrise/sunset data, all transferred directly from B2B deployments.
Activities differentiated the app most sharply from basic competitors. Rather than simple on/off timers, the system ran a full circadian rhythm engine automatically adjusting color temperature and brightness based on time of day and the user's real GPS sunrise/sunset data.
Users wanted lights on before the sun fully rose. The offset control (−30 min, −15 min) solved this in user-language terms without exposing absolute times that would need seasonal adjustment.
Phases were anchored by warm color swatches, not Kelvin values. "Relax" at 17:30 was set by picking a warm amber swatch, emotional language replacing technical specification, lowering the bar for adoption.
TRANSLATING B2B DEPTH INTO Consumer Confidence
The project produced a consumer product capable of competing directly against established apps, while preserving the technical depth that made the enterprise platform valuable.
Areas / Zones / Devices / Accessories hierarchy maps to how users think about their homes, zero technical terminology at the top level.
Mesh, subnet config and repeater management rendered fully invisible to consumers, while remaining accessible to PRO installers.
A GPS-based circadian engine with emotional-language scheduling positioned the app well above basic on/off-timer competitors.
Pre-installation commissioning via NFC/QR enabled a configure-then-install workflow novel in the consumer lighting space.
Two-tone color strategy, motion semantics and a component library established a coherent system for future platform scaling.
Property-manager and vacation-home capability, unaddressed by any primary competitor, opened a premium segment beyond the single residence.
The Auto Select model only became possible once engineering confirmed system confidence in choosing optimal nodes. The best UX decision, remove the decision entirely, required trusting engineering data. Cross-functional candor produced the outcome, not design alone.
The same underlying capabilities, subnet management, role-based access, multi-site control, needed expression in consumer language and mental models. The PRO role and multi-home features came directly from B2B and became differentiators in B2C.
Light Control, opened 10–20× per day, received the most iteration, testing and engineering negotiation. The accordion, dual-level controls and status indicators all came from multiple feedback rounds. Daily ritual screens matter far more than configuration screens.
Scheduling landed better named Wake-Up, Relax, Dinner, Sleep than labeled by Kelvin. The circadian engine was technically sophisticated; the UI had to make it feel like curating a mood, not programming a system. Emotional interface on a technical substrate is the core craft of consumer IoT.