Product Designer
Samsung CX Innovation Lab, Mountain View CA
Samsung
A place to come togather
The Family Hub is a smart refrigerator with a large multi-use display on the door. The goal of the product was to make the Family Hub the planning and communication center for the whole family.
Interaction Design
The interaction design of the Family Hub centered around a masonry-grid home screen with widgets that served as ingresses to the various Family Hub apps like calendar, photos, etc. Tapping into any widget would open the app, tapping on the bottom of the bezel would return the user to home.
Family Profiles
Bringing the entire family into the Family Hub ecosystem was core to the value proposition of the product. We developed playful concepts like monster profile pictures to encourage kids to interact. The color that was selected for your monster would be your color throughout Family Hub OS. For example, if your were added to a calendar activity a colored dot representing you would appear on that calendar item.
Usability testing
Throughout the development process we conducted usability testing with outside participants. We created protoype hardware by mounting a touch screen to an existing refrigerator.
Family notifications
We developed a notification system that could be leveraged by a wide variety of third party smart home device and service companies. The notifications tray could be revealed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen.
Device controls
Along with the communication and media apps, we developed digital controls for the refrigerator hardware. The primary challenge with this effort was creating an information architecture that was easily navigable by users.
Systems Screens
For the more utilitarian screens like setup & network configuration, we developed a visual design language that was both easy to parse and interact with. Extra large hit areas were used to make it easier to tap the large vertical touch-screen while standing in front of it.
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