Smart Indoor Camera

Hive Home  |  Product Design Lead  |  2017

Hive Home offer a range of connected (IoT) devices that are all managed through one central app. For the launch of their latest flagship device, Hive View (a smart indoor camera), my role involved managing the end to end app design process and incorporating the new product features and functionality into the existing app architecture.

In terms of the initial product offering, senior stakeholders and business analysts had conducted research into the customer pains and gains this product was going to service. With this, I was equipped with a well defined set of users stories and a few product ideas that we believed would address the needs of Hive customers considering the purchase of a new home security camera.

Given the camera would be one of the multiple products customers could control within their app, some architectural decisions and constraints had already been set for us. Therefore, as a cross-functional team, we had the freedom to jump right in and collaboratively begin designing workflows and UIs for the core feature set.

Following a few rounds of internal workshops and prototype testing, we were in a position to start spec’ing high fidelity designs and prototypes that looked and felt more realistic which we could further test with customers.

Below is a high-level look at some of the design deliverables I created over the course of the 6 month project. These were used to test and validate our efforts as well as manage the front end implementation across iOS and Android.

While in the armed mode, the camera’s primary function is to monitor an area of one’s home and alert users via push notification to any motion or audible activity that occurs during daily, user-defined schedules.

Users are sent to the live stream via the notification (or if the event has ended, sent to the recorded event in the timeline) where they are able to talk via the microphone. In addition to the primary security use case, research identified that users of competing products often managed to catch happy moments of family life on camera and, based on this insight, we built a manual recording feature allowing users to create their own recordings.

If users are unable to view the feed immediately, the events timeline is where they will find previous recordings. During playback of an event, users have detailed visibility of activity within the recording and, using the video ‘scrubber’, they can skip to points in the recording where spikes of motion or audio were detected.

Users have powerful camera settings allowing them to define periods when the camera should be armed, when they should be notified about activity, which areas within the camera’s view should take priority and the types of activity the camera should ignore. This is handy for those of us with furry friends at home.

The real magic of Hive View comes into focus when you consider the home automation possibilities once connected to the rest of Hive’s suite of products. Never mind setting a camera schedule, just set the camera to arm when your front door sensor closes in the morning and disarm when it opens again at night.

As a consultant at Hive, a key responsibility was to lay the groundwork and design foundations so that the product team could continue to flourish after my departure. I am proud to see much of the interaction design principles and UI patterns we established are still guiding the product today. If you’re interested, find out more about Hive View.