Competition & Inspiration Overview

I had a few ideas that I wanted to contribute to the design of our wifi controlled energy app, but its important to consider the design elements of any existing solutions so I can compare aesthetics and also make sure the design of our app is better, in our opinion.

ube: Control your Lights from your Smartphone.

ube is a central app that controls lights, plug sockets and dimmer switches. ube also produce electrical components like the dimmer switched and plug sockets to use with the app. 

Our primary focus with the Ube app is that is be simple, intuitive and not get in the way of controlling your lights. That’s why we created a whole new way to interact with the app. We take full advantage of the touchscreen nature of smart phones to make our app gesture based. Slide your thumb up to raise the lights and down to lower the lights. 

Considering ube's mission statement to make the user interface simple and intuitive, as well as their clean crisply designed website and branding - the ACTUAL UI is quite convoluted and crowded.

This is the Scene configuration window. Users use this to set up rooms or scenes.

The skeumorphic design of the sliders and controls is confusing and boring to look at. It seems quite labour-intensive to set up, I feel like this would be less of a chore with a more friendly user interface.

This is the Energy Reporting window, here ube displays economic information to the user.

This window concept is something that could be useful for our app. The bar graph is a good way of showing the savings that the ube interfaces help make. ube also sends reminders and notifications to users when energy consumption rises substantially - this is a useful way 

of communicating data to the user.

This is the main control window. Users can dim or brighten lights and select which light to use.

The design off the whole app really lets the concept down. In this over-cluttered window users can switch between which scene they want to control and then dim the lights with the slider. I dont like this design of the buttons - it is blocky and overcomplicated and takes up more screen space than is needed. I imagine they are easy to use as they will have a large selective area, perhaps this was the company's main priority instead of the visual aesthetic of the app.