Thermostat Design Project
The challenge for this project was to design an interactive thermostat display that reflects how people think about thermostats without changing the basic operation of the thermostat or the home’s heating or cooling system How we as a team addressed this problem: To address the problem associated with overturning your thermostate we decided that as the user turns the versa wheel and increases the temperature between desired and ambient temperature the time at bottom of the thermostate would increase notifying the user that the time to desired is greater the more they overturn the dial.
First Iteration sketch: Our first attempt we included a time to desired temperature reading. We thought this might reinforce the behavior of overturning the temperature. We also included hubs that were connected to the base station and could be installed throughout the house.
This was our very first iteration of this project. As you can see even in the early stages a couple of very prominent functionality started to form. The first, is that even in our earliest iterations we focused on time as a negative reinforcement for turning the thermostat to high. We also have a smaller hub that is situated away from the main terminal. Our original design also had the ability to receive calls from your phone; essentially, allowing you to change the temperature in your home remotely.
Fourth iterative drawing: This drawing starts to take the form of a circular thermostat with that operates with circular touch button system. Desired day and night temperatures can be controlled with the top left and right control bars.
Our fifth iteration with paper usability test: For this test I took a subject and had them draw on the picture as to improvements that could be made after they went through a scripted usability test. As you can see many things needed to be changed or adjusted according to user preferences.
Final draft drawing incorporating the ideas used in the usability test.
