Vivint Element Thermostat UI

The talented industrial design team at Vivint designed the award-winning Element Thermostat. It has a dead fronted face that lights up when it detects someone approaching it. It had a rocker-style input for the up and down arrows and one button on the side. The only other feedback was a multi-color LED at the bottom of the thermostat.

My role was to design a friendly, yet robust interface within these physical constraints, that also worked well with the mobile app experience that I designed previously. I prototyped the experience using Pixate on an iPad that showed the right proportions. I also developed iconography with the constraint that the display had non-square pixels. Finally, I went through several rounds of usability testing.

Thermostat Control

I redesigned the screen-based thermostat control before the Element Thermostat was designed. Otherwise, we may have gone with a more unified approach between visual language of the hardware and the software. I designed dozens of explorations before landing on a design that fulfilled our visual design principles, aligned with the global app redesign effort I was leading, and fulfilled the necessary requirements such as working well with multiple thermostats supported by Vivint.