Why another doorbell?

70% of home deliveries are dropped off right in front of the door. Yet, for many video doorbell users now, the floor area right in 
front the door is a blindspot. The Maximus Answer™ fills this gap.

Our team at Kuna partnered with Maximus to create Answer™ – a DualCam video doorbell that allows users to see and talk to visitors in real time, play pre-recorded greetings, sound the alarm, and more. The design is obvious yet one of a kind in the market. 

The top and bottom camera provides a field-of-view that allows users to see both faces of tall people and packages on the ground, both of which are often cropped off in competitor products.

Users control Answer™ via the Kuna app. The “android of 
home security”, Kuna allows users to control smart devices 
like outdoor cameras, lights and motion sensors so they fit seamlessly into homes.

Challenge & Scope

The hardware design of Answer™ had been finalized when I entered the project. As the core Product & Visual Designer, my role spans 
across the entire app design cycle. I was in charge of integrating the doorbell's unique hardware functionality with UIUX patterns of our existing app.

Iterate, Test, Repeat

Storyboarding, prototyping and user testing 
helped us consider the entire user journey as well as details on the interactions.

Industry research, competitive analysis and 
2 rounds of in-house/remote user interviews 
helped us identify key user stories.

The App

We prioritized and made decisions based on a balance between user experience, stakeholder goals, and implementation dependencies.

Prevention, Not Reaction

When it came to home deliveries and activity that happen at the door, users cared about preventing crime from happening in the first place.

• Instead of having the users unlock their phone, find our app, open the app, then open up Live View - We cut down steps by using Rich Notifications.
• Users can see 
and respond to every event, 
without unlocking their phone.
• We restructured the way notifications are labeled. By adding emojis and the reason for the detection, users can easily prioritize important notifications. Easy implementation, big value! 😄

Get the Whole Story

The live view is designed with 2 modes that addressed the homeowner's key use cases in their day-to-day.

• Stacked View: Security-conscious homeowners wanted the max field of view from both the top & bottom camera. They didn't want to miss their young child coming home, their dog going out to play, and especially if an unwanted stranger is hiding a weapon behind their back.


• Picture-in-Picture View: Users valued the top camera much more than the bottom, and a conversational interaction was important when speaking with mailmen, friends, and contractors. Toggling to the bottom camera to see package details was also a major use case.

Jump Back to What's Important

As part of the existing Kuna app, we have an “animated thumbnail timeline” that allows users to easily scroll through events that have happened. How will this translate when there are two cameras?

We decided on an "expandable thumbnail" interaction. Why?

• Activity in the bottom camera was important, but infrequent. This expandable thumbnail allowed the user to easily move past inactivity, but also see the whole story at a glance.
• Our average user gets about 5-7 events a day. While that doesn't sound like a lot, we realized that showing the entire doorbell image (stacked) would cause inefficient scrolling. This design allowed the user to skim, while keeping our engineers sane. 👀

Implementation

We passed different segments of the design to the developers while other parts of the design was still in progress. This allowed engineers to get a head start while we continued to iterate. Project milestones and tasks are tracked using 
Atlassian Jira.

We interacted with the engineers on a daily basis, but we also scheduled weekly stand-ups to:


• Go over progress and milestones

• QA and review current versions of the app

• Make sure the design is implemented as expected
• Make sure everyone is on the same page




Outcome

While this product is not out in the market just yet, 
there are still takeaways!

Next steps
: We set metrics tracking in the app to measure user engagement, how frequent certain features are used, among others. We will collect feedback from early adopters via user surveys, interviews, etc.



What went well so far
: Flexible design process and good teamwork allowed us to pull the product together in an efficient way.



What could be improved
: It never hurts to have more user testing! It's always a fun challenge to juggle priorities in a startup setting. Changing constraints from the hardware side also caused delays in making product decisions.