Nokia Smart Home

Overview

Nokia was expanding beyond telecommunications into the connected home space. I led UX Direction for their Smart Home platform — designing the experience layer for a suite of IoT devices including security cameras, environmental sensors, and a central hub that brought it all together.

Challenge

The smart home market was crowded and confusing. Consumers were overwhelmed by competing ecosystems, complicated setup processes, and apps that required a PhD to navigate. Nokia needed a differentiated experience that leveraged their brand trust while making connected home technology genuinely accessible to non-technical households.

Approach

We took a research-first approach, spending significant time in users' actual homes:

• Contextual inquiry — Conducted in-home research sessions with 30+ households across three countries to understand how people actually live with (and struggle with) connected devices
• Ecosystem mapping — Designed the information architecture for a platform that needed to gracefully scale from a single camera to a fully connected home
• Setup experience — Obsessed over the out-of-box experience, creating a setup flow that could be completed in under 3 minutes without reading a manual
• Ambient interfaces — Pioneered "calm technology" design patterns where the system works quietly in the background and only demands attention when truly needed
• Multi-user design — Created permission and personalization models for households where multiple family members with different technical abilities share the same system

Results

• Setup completion rate of 94% — industry-leading for IoT devices at the time
• Average setup time under 3 minutes, compared to 15+ minutes for competitor products
• User satisfaction scores consistently above 4.5/5 across all markets
• Design patterns for ambient notification and calm technology were published and referenced across Nokia's broader product portfolio

"Lee brought a rare combination of strategic thinking and human empathy to a deeply technical product challenge. His team's work set the standard for how we approach consumer IoT design." — Nokia Connected Home Division