Vivint Smart Security

In the United States, 94–99% of all police physical responses to burglar alarm activations are false. False alarms are costly to home owners, Vivint, and for tax payers the annual bill for police responses exceeds $1 billion. Many home owners rarely arm their security system after the hassle of experiencing a false alarm. About 2/3rds of people who have security systems leave them off. Because of this, home owners do not receive the value of the monitoring service that comes with their monthly subscription. I worked closely with a product manager and good friend, Jeff Whitlock, to evolve the Vivint system to try to reduce false alarms and provide value to users who never arm their system or forget to arm it. We solved it by working through a mountain of edge cases to implement a self-monitoring system which eliminates false alarms and allowed for auto-arming.

The most common reason for false alarms is people opening a door or window forgetting that their home is armed. I created these storyboards to conceptualize the problem and show possible solutions.

One of the biggest problems with traditional home security systems is the system lacks situational awareness and therefore can’t appropriately respond to situations in the home.

I conceptualized this problem using the metaphor of a police dog that only had 2 states—completely docile or full on attack mode. Obviously a real police dog with only these states wouldn’t be very useful. A trained dog needs to know when to be alert and wait for commands from its owner and needs to be able to intimidate without attacking. Only in special circumstances should the dog act more autonomously.

This conceptualization was used through the company as a way to reduce friction associated with false alarms and features that would improve the security experience.