"August’s Smart Locks proved to be the key to my Smart Home puzzle." - Techcrunch
Phase One: First UX Hire (2014)
I joined August Home in April 2014 as the first and only in-house UX designer, four months before the release of the company’s first product, the August Smart Lock.
My projects at August Home in 2014 included:
UX design of 2-factor auth-based account signup
UX design of August Smart Lock setup and calibration
UX design of August Connect (Wi-Fi bridge) setup and usage
In-home user testing of August Smart Lock installation and setup
Collaboration, refinement and negotiation of visual design language with fuseproject (our brand and industrial design agency)
The pace of work was already extremely aggressive during most of 2014. At the end of the year, the CEO announced ambitious plans to release four new hardware products in the next 12 months. I immediately began advocating for additional UX hires at the company.
Phase Two: Team Building and UX Director Role (2015-2017)
From early 2015 to mid-2016, as the company grew from 15 to 80+ employees, my role quickly evolved from UX Designer to UX Manager and eventually UX Director. During this time I personally recruited, hired and trained a team of three direct UX design reports, and began delegating work among team members while continuing to produce as an individual contributor. Over the course of 18 months our team helped launch four(!) additional smart home hardware products, including the August Smart Lock (2nd generation), August Doorbell Cam, August Connect and August Smart Keypad.
I cannot overstate just how much I learned about leading UX at a fast-moving startup during this period. It was alternately and sometimes simultaneously exhilarating, frustrating, politically-charged, and rewarding. Perhaps the most gratifying part of the role was getting the opportunity to mentor a team of young and talented designers.
Our four-person team’s large portfolio of responsibility included:
Creating and managing hundreds of iOS and Android artboards, in Sketch and Zeplin;
Creating and user-testing interactive UI prototypes using Flinto, Tumult Hype, and occasionally other tools;
Creating video prototypes of feature concepts in Hype/Flinto/Final Cut Pro;
Creating end-to-end task flows in Omnigraffle;
Offering design input and guidance on direct interactions with our hardware products;
Publishing and managing design specification documents on our intranet site;
Creating, testing and managing online installation guides for all four products in the August Smart Home Access System;
Constantly writing, managing and updating dozens of how-to and troubleshooting articles on our support site;
Leading user research and user testing initiatives to validate product features, industrial design and UX design
Reviewing and supporting UI of external partner integrations;
Designing occasional web pages for august.com (though most of this work is owned by the marketing team);
Reviewing app feature implementations and filing/managing bugs in partnership with the QA, dev and product teams;
Designing occasional HTML emails;
"Product managing" our designs in partnership with the product and dev teams
Checking in with Yves Béhar, our co-founder, and his team at fuseproject, to keep things on-brand
