HOMIE APP
Make your home smarter. Let it communicate with you to tell how much you are spending for electricity in real-time, to understand how you are using it, in order to become more efficient and optimise your consumptions. You will be able to monitor your more energy consuming appliances and devices, get to know their environmental impact and many other useful information to increase your energy awareness.All of this and much more always with you, everywhere, thanks to the HOMIE APP for your smartphone. Very comprehensive and easy to be used, it will show you meaningful information and analytics about your energy consumption, for the present and for the past, as well consumption forecasts for the future and many other things you still do not know about your appliances.
You will get all of that available from your smartphone for each of the homes where you have installed a HOMIE HUB. In addition you will have the possibility to set up and receive smart notifications so that you can have the best possible user experience and get the maximum from your HOMIE.
One of our main goal is to make understandable and clear for everyone the value of the energy we consume, but unit of measurement such kW or kWh often are not well understood. For this reason when you open the HOMIE APP the fist thing it will tell you is about your spend: automatically and in real-time the energy consumption is converted in €, or any other appropriate currency value. In this way, with a simple glance, anyone can get a clear idea of what is the value of the energy that has been used.
EASY
CLEAR
STYLISH
Just opening the app and in a second it is clear exactly how much is consuming in that precise moment the home under monitoring, and the consumption value, like other relevant information are constantly updated in real-time.
Having a dynamic feedback in real-time makes concrete the feeling really monitor what is happening. For this we believe that putting together a graphical representation of the relevant info, in a easy and comprehensive way, with the real-time monitoring of the energy consumption, allow to actually increase the energy awareness for everyone of us.
The machine learning algorithms in the ALLO cloud are constantly running to identify and monitor the profiles of the more energy consuming appliances and devices in your home, showing for each of them details of usage, spend, electricity consumption and environmental impact.
The amazing thing in all of this is that the identification and monitoring automatically happen without the need to add any smart-plug for each of the appliances or even change a single component in your home electrical circuit.
A key aspect for energy awareness is to realise the environmental impact of the electricity consumption in terms of CO2 emissions. With a set of ad hoc and clear graphs and effective analytics, HOMIE APP allow to understand in an easy way what is the carbon emission associated to the energy consumed, or what is the saving, in case the supply is 100% green energy.
Transferring a data, information or a message to a user in an effective and comprehensive way is the first step to create awareness. HOMIE APP has been conceived to make this as much as possible natural and straightforward, with a simple style, enjoyable and easily recognisable. With data and info always at the right place to avoid confusion or distraction.
ERGONOMICS AND USABILITY
In the development of HOMIE APP a lot of attention has been put into ergonomics and user-friendliness in the interaction, so everything started considering the dimension of the human fingers that have to interact on the display through the several components present in the app.
The user interface is developed to be clearly shown on the smartphone screens, where the whole interaction is done with the fingers. So, since the beginning, we have created all the interactive elements with the right dimensions for ensuring a natural and effective user experience. This gives a better feeling and avoid the inconvenience of a wrong or unintended interaction.
Forefinger
medium width
44 - 57 px
THUMB
It gives less precision in the touch and a more complex interaction with the edges of the screen but it allows interaction and holding at the same time with one single hand
FOREFINGER
It gives a higher precision in the touch on specific portion of the UI but it requires the other hand for holding the smartphone
The buttons have been developed with the right dimensions to be used in both ways. The small componente have been avoided, where possible, because they require high precision to be activated and make the interaction more complex, while our target is to simplify it. Another aspect that has been considered to define the ergonomics and the UI of the HOMIE APP, is that the average dimension of the smartphone displays is growing, making harder to reach every portion of the screen with a single hand for interaction and holding; from this aspect is also born the cards structure of the dashboard.
ALWAYS ON
THE BALL, IN REAL-TIME
Avere un feedback istantaneo e dinamico che mostra realmente quello che si sta consumendo è fondamentale per poter sostenere di monitorare veramente una struttura.
Il sistema in real-time di HOMIE, a differenza di altre soluzioni che possono disporre solo di dati "vecchi" di minuti o addirittura ore, permette in tempo reale di conoscere e se necessario intervenire in maniera proattiva sui consumi o sul funzionamento dei dispositivi che stanno assorbendo energia.
The Energy card, in the dashboard of the app, displays in real-time the power in kW absorbed by the house, changing its colour becoming yellow to alert the user when the consumption is particularly high, or becoming red when there is the risk to reach the point of disconnection of the power. This colour variation will be shown at the same time by the HOMIE HUB, its lighting will be working with exactly the same logic. It is a true team work, that allows to all the family members without a smartphone at hand to understand the current consumption status and take action to avoid extremely high consumption or power interruption.
NORMAL CONSUMPTION
The monitored consumption is in the standard
HIGH CONSUMPTION
It has been reached or surpassed to 80% of the available power
CLOSE TO POWER DISCONNECTION
The consumption is near to the threshold of power disconnection
HOMIE is a solution composed by a mobile App for the user interface, the Hub for the consumption measurements and the Cloud where the data are processed. The cooperation and communication of those elements allow to monitor your home in real-time, making it a smarter home without the need to modify the electrical circuit.
The main target of HOMIE is to increase the people’s energy awareness and make every home a smart-home. This include of course the possibility to send and receive at the right time relevant information.
So if you want, it will be like if it is your home to send a notification to alert you in real-time when a high consumption is reached or if you are risking to be cut off, or many other situations. Giving you, even when you are away from home, useful information and stronger awareness of what is happening at home.
FONTS AND READABILITY
Since the first steps of the app design and its UI we have put a lot of attention on the research of the best font to be adopted. It has been selected a neutral, simple and light font, which being a San Serif font it offers a better readability in particular for small font sizes. A good readability means less stress for the eyes and a better user experience. With the target to minimise the stress for the eyes focused on a too light screen, we decided to implement for the whole app a dark blue background with white writing in contrast. We have adopted the same concept in use by the software products dedicated to coders and SW developers. We wanted to put the focus and try to avoid additional eyestrain, other than just find the best colours combination for the app.
Inside the app is present a well structured hierarchy of the information, that is visible and understandable following the dimension of the fonts. A bigger dimension is given to highlight the most important data, making them visible at a glance. With the same idea, while reducing the importance of the information, also the dimension of the font becomes smaller and the style chances, up to the smallest characters dedicated to the very detailed info.
RELEVANT DATA
To be immediately read at a glance
TITLE AND SUBTITLE
Adding important information to the relevant data
DEPENING
Adding details and additional information to the relevant data
PALETTE DI COLORI
The color palette adopted by the UI of the HOMIE App is composed by vibrant and bright shades, all contrasting in a strong way with the ALLO’s BLUE of every screen background and also widely adopted for our corporate identity. We have selected a set of colours very different from each other so that they become highly recognisable, and we have added a shade to help in distinguish them even better. Everyone of the six shades is associated to a specific section of the app and helps to make recognisable at a simple glance which kind of information the user is consulting.
This means that the choice of the colours has been done not only considering aesthetics standards, but with the target to make the app interaction easier for everyone, also considering who might have problems to identify specific colours.
ALLO Blu
Spend
Appliances
Footprint
Energy
Infographics
COLOR BLINDNESS
While selecting the main shades that define each of the app section, we have analysed how each of the colour would have been interpreted by who is affected by anomalies of colour vision. So we have defined every shades in order to make it different and recognisable by everyone.
On the right are shown the six shades we have selected and how they appear to someone is suffering these visual problems. The colours remains different from each other and most important they can always be identified. In addition to that, the shades are not flat but a shade helps to make them even more recognisable.
DEUTERANOPIA
Problems with green
PROTANOPIA
Problems with red
TRITANOPIA
Problems with blue and yellow
SURF
WITHOUT LOOSING THE PLOT
The structure of the HOMIE APP is split in two different levels, the first one is composed by the four main sections where there are the most relevant information, readable with a glance. Then we have the second level done with the internal sections rich in specific contents, dynamic graphs and detailed information.
Inside the app the user can easily and quickly browse through the various sections using the ‘floating’ menu bar positioned at the bottom. It is an always present element that thanks to its appearance it stays suspended without affect the reading of the contents and don’t limit the length of each screen allowing to use the maximum of the display to show contents.
On the menu are present four icons for the main sections of the app. Every one of these sections contain different topics and information, and the icon allows with one look to know which section we want to go or where are the info we are looking for.
MY PLACES
Dynamic list of houses and devices under monitoring
DASHBOARD
Analytics related to spend, energy consumption, carbon footprint, appliances, etc…
NOTIFICATIONS
Display, creation and management of notifications and alerts
SETTINGS
Settings related to account, HOMIE HUB, subscription, et
SPEND
ENERGY
FOOTPRINT
APPLIANCES
INFOGRAPHICS
From the dashboard we have the possibility to access the five sub-sections containing the monitored data. Those, other that having an iconography that makes immediate understanding what is monitored inside the section, they are chromatically separated. The same separation is applied to the contacts and graphs inside every sub-sections, allowing the user to quickly recognise what is under monitoring. Spend is magenta and collects all the info related to the economics (i.e. expenditures and budgets). Energy includes everything associated to the electricity consumption. Footprint is the sub-section where is monitored the environmental impact related to the electricity production required for our domestic consumptions. Under Appliances there is a list of the appliances and devices monitored by HOMIE, with the all the relevant details and analytics. Finally, under Infographics there are funny illustrations we use to help in increasing the energy awareness and explains energy topics in a simple and enjoyable way understandable by anyone.
FROM SKETCHES TO PIXELS
After the definition of the main points of the user experience and the high level aspects of the graphic interface, like for example fonts and colours, the development has been focused on the design and creation of the user interface. The target along all the development path has been the reduction of the number of the elements contained in every screens, filtering and removing anything was not important, avoiding to adopt solutions driven by purely aesthetic considerations instead of functionalities. The aim was to reach an interface genuinely focused on the monitoring, but also something that in its extreme simplicity has a strong identity.
Here are graphically summarised the three fundamental steps about the preparatory studies for the development of the HOMIE App user interface. The first sketches where the constraints and solutions defined in the UX where already considered, the step ahead to the wireframe design, where other than the positioning and balancing of all the elements, an initial mockup of the interface is created, to finally reach the step where a study pixel by pixel is done for every component of the UI.
FANCY CHARTING BY HOMIE
HOMIE App is not an app for tech people only or specialists, it has the target to increase the energy awareness in anyone who is using it, regardless the background. Inside an energy monitoring app, the graphs of course can be necessary and always present but often they bring with them a feeling of technicality that is not aligned with the target of realise an app suitable for everyone. So we have created our own ‘’library’, transforming the graphs in something lighter, removing the unnecessary technicalities, making them simple, colourful, informal, becoming also decorative elements of the unique user interface of HOMIE App, aligned to the target of being comprehensive for all.
With a simple glance, thanks also to the colour palette, it is possible recognise a specific section and understand if we are looking at a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly graphs, while getting a clear understanding of the trend, without the need of the graph’s scale or other details. In addition to that, to improve the interpretation of the data and make it more effective, we have partially overlapped two graphs in each of the cards, where we show the current period together with the corresponding just passed. This allows to have an immediate comparison that gives value and more explanation to the trend.
Anno
Mese
Giorno
Settimana
Dettaglio
spesa di una
giornata
“THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS"
Inside every section is present a set of analytics and graphs that address the need to know up to the small details the spend, the energy consumption and the environmental footprint, for the past, present and future of every single appliance or entire home monitored by HOMIE.
Compared to the graphs in the dashboard, these have a target to transfer a lot of information, more complex and detailed, even if also in this case their stylistic development has been guided by the will to implement nice components, simple and usable by all the types of user.
RICONOSCIMENTO INTELLIGENTE DEI DISPOSITIVI
Similarly to a voice recognition system that identifies words, phrases and voice, the HOMIE artificial intelligence identifies the electrical devices using their energy profile, following their work cycle, identifying when they switch on and switch off, other than determining how much they consume and cost. Without the need to add smart-plugs not even notifying the home electrical circuit. The HOMIE installation requires few minutes, it is not invasive and it transforms every home in a smart-home.
We have created a scalable cloud solution that we constantly update. Wee evolve. The algorithms of our machine learning both to increase the number of appliance we can monitor and the performance we have in the ability to identify them. We did it to offer a platform that is ready to accept the changes that will heavily impact our consumptions, like the diffusion of electric vehicles and more in general the electrification trend we are all part of.
The technological brain of HOMIE, through its algorithms running in the cloud, handles the samples processed and sent by HOMIE HUB. They are active H24 and constantly processing the data, calculating your energy expenses, your consumptions, environmental impact in respect of both the whole house or a specific appliance. Everything in real-time giving all of this to you (and much more) directly on the phone you carry in your pocket.
