Design Research for Smart Lighting
Discovering the role of light in everyday lives
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What role does light actually play in people's daily lives? It's a deceptively simple question. For Philips Hue, answering it was the key to making their product relevant beyond a tech-savvy early adopter audience. We were asked to work alongside the internal design team and explore how the Hue app could reach a much larger audience.
The Challenge
After strong initial success, Philips saw that mass adoption of the Hue system was plateauing. The appeal among early adopters was clear, but the product had not broken through to a mainstream audience. The question was whether this was a product problem, a communication problem, or something else entirely.
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Research
We conducted extensive user research across three markets: the US, China, and Germany, exploring how people actually experience light in their homes. We looked at routines, moods, rituals, and the moments when lighting genuinely matters. The research revealed that most people did not think about light in the way Philips had assumed.
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The insights pointed to a fundamental mismatch between the app's technical framing and the way users thought about their homes and daily rhythms. People did not want to program lights. They wanted light that felt right.
Solution
The research insights fed directly into a series of design sprints, resulting in prototypes that were tested across three rounds of iteration. The redesigned app was built around users' mental models rather than the product's technical architecture, a shift that made it feel dramatically more intuitive and relevant.
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The outcome was an app that felt like it understood how people actually live. It won a Red Dot Design Award and received widespread press coverage, with The Verge noting it as a significant step forward for the platform.
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