case studies
Havr is building the first light-enabled smartlock; it allows users to open doors with a phone flashlight. I met the founders of Havr while in college, and long story short, I ended up leading the design team. As the first full-time designer, my goal was to:
• build the best product among the competition
• build scalable design systems, processes and frameworks
• create a user-centric company culture
In order to build the best product, we had to solve the following challenge:
The first version of the mobile app had some serious flaws because we lacked information on our users. Luckily, at this stage, only our team members were using the app, so we went back to both quantitative and qualitative research. We went to conventions exhibitions, sent surveys to people who had signed up on our websiteWe quickly found that our team had wrongfully reduced our B2B users to one persona (building managers), when in fact each building manager would share keys with dozens or hundreds of employees; these employees had a very different pattern of usage...
Employees typically have a small set of keys, which they use on a daily basis. The manager can have access to hundreds of keys. Both employees and the manager want to quickly open any door.
Aside from the speed and ease of opening doors, we were able to find the most critical points in the app that would have a large impact on the global experience:
Open & close doors
Install a lock
Share a key
While there are 2 designers at Havr, I think of the entire Havr team of thirteen people as part of our design team. Design Thinking helps our team design better products, experiences, and services, and it ensures that innovation stays at the core of our company.
One of our biggest design challenges has been the creation of a flawless experience throughout our complex ecosystem, which includes hardware, software, and services. To tackle this issue, we use user journey mapping, a simple yet effective tool. By empowering sales, marketing, design and tech teams to gather around and focus solely on the user, we were able to discover customer problems and quickly turn them into solutions.
Some on the most important features of the BrightLock app are quite long and complex flows: account creation, lock installation, and key sharing. Building wireflows from start to finish allows us to have a bird's eye view of the process and easily improve it. We turned every single form into linear flows (one screen, one action or input), which has had a very positive impact on user clarity and simplicity.
Using the wireflows, we build wireframes: low-fidelity representations of the product design that allow for quicker iterations before designing the actual product.
We always prototype the most important parts of our products to test different solutions with users and validate our assumptions. We use tools like Figma, Principle and Origami, depending on the level of accuracy we need.
When approaching our main challenge at Havr, how to open doors, we prototyped countless solutions during a couple of months. We brainstormed different types of list, grids, favorites... In the end, a trip to China helped me connect the dots and explore a game-changing solution. I found that this single UX tweak reduces the time it takes users to unlock a door by up to 50%.
Right from the start, I knew we were going to build several digital products. A design system would be essential to ensure consistency, quality, and speed for both design and tech teams. Our solution started small with just a few components and gradually grew into a more mature Atomic design system in Figma that can handle all of our needs. The design system is used across all our products: iOS and Android apps, Web platf, and websites.
Right from the start, I knew we were going to build several digital products. A design system would be essential to ensure consistency, quality, and speed for both design and tech teams. Our solution started small with just a few components and gradually grew into a more mature Atomic design system in Figma that can handle all of our needs. The design system is used across all our products: iOS and Android apps, Web platf, and websites.
Havr raised +2.5M€ to pursue its aims and enable tomorrow’s home services. We won an Innovation Award at 2019’s CES, and some of the biggest French companies are already testing our product.
Now specifically on the Design side :
• the new UX reduces door entry time by 3x and fail rate by 80%
• our Design System now allows us to design and code consistent products even faster
• Design now has a large influence on the company : simplicity is now Havr's main value