Smart Alert Nightlight
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight combined smart hardware and app software to enhance home safety. It detected smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, sending smartphone alerts and escalating to phone calls if ignored. Emergency contacts could hear the alarm, dismiss it, or call local emergency services, ensuring timely action when it mattered most.
As VP of Design and the sole hands-on designer, I ensured the product was intuitive and reliable, even in high-stress emergencies. I designed a clear, user-friendly experience that guided people effortlessly through critical moments, blending physical and digital interactions into a system anyone could trust under pressure.
Highlights
- Optimized onboarding, reducing support requests by ~40%
- Revamp app UX to accommodate new functionality and devices
- Established new UX flows to collect feedback and train sound recognition AI
- Improved existing features and functionality
Preparing for post launch future
At launch, the Smart Alert recognized most standard USA smoke and CO alarms. The ultimate promise was to recognize sounds throughout the home. I lead the design strategy to pave the way to the future while providing stepping stones in the present. I lead the effort to redesign the app experience to accommodate upcoming uses cases including more types of sound detection and a new security cam product that was in development.
Before
After
After (+ Video)
Challenges
Through reviews, interviews and observation, I uncovered critical business and user challenges that shaped our strategy moving forward.
Business
- High initial support costs
- Rudimentary sound recognition technology, false alarms
- Not enough features/value to justify the high price point
- Low customer lifetime value + high hardware costs
Users
- Only recognizes some smoke and CO alarms
- Too expensive, needs to do more or cost less
- False alarms that do not learn from the past
- In an emergency, people want to see what’s going on
SOlutions
Learn More sounds
Add video to ecosystem
Real-time feedback
Fix onboarding flow
Impact
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Needs content
Transforming Flaws Into a Delightful Experience
Our temperature and humidity sensor wasn’t perfect. We optimised it as much as possible but since the number value was displayed on the main screen, we would still get support calls when it didn’t match customers thermostat. I opted to remove the temperature value from the home screen and display general temperature ranges. This reduced the focus on accurate temperature numbers, reduced support calls and increased satisfaction.
Improved Alerts & algorithm feedback
At launch, the Smart Alert recognized most standard USA smoke and CO alarms. The ultimate promise was to recognize sounds throughout the home. I lead the design strategy to pave the way to the future while providing stepping stones in the present.
Alarm detected
Call for help
Dismiss alert
Roadmap to New listening capabilities
At launch, the Smart Alert recognized most standard USA smoke and CO alarms. The ultimate promise was to recognize sounds throughout the home. I lead the design strategy to pave the way to the future while providing stepping stones in the present.
New app structure paved the way to the future
I redesigned the application flows and UI to accommodate requested features: Multiple sound alert types with the ability to train new sounds, a complete alert history showing what happened even if the alert had been cleared, support for multiple homes and devices
A simple fix to a high risk problem
The Smart Alert had a known firmware issue during install. For a small number of users, the nightlight and app would appear to get stuck, forcing a reset or continuing to unplug the nightlight not giving it enough time would result in an unrecoverable state of the hardware.
A firmware fix would have required a high-risk update. Identifying and redirecting users with this problem in the app provided a simple solution to ensure a good experience, minimize support requests and avoid risk.
