Designing for Nest, one pixel-perfect screen at a time
Nest is the maker of smart home products best known for its learning thermostat, one of the products that helped popularize the modern connected home, built around a mission of making simple, thoughtful devices that fit naturally into everyday life.
Nest brought in Vervint to help design the app experience for its thermostat, working as an extension of Nest’s own team to deliver polished, pixel-accurate screens on a fast-moving weekly cadence.
Move at Nest’s pace
Keep up with a team of three matching the cadence of Nest’s own team of 30, working across three time zones.
Get every detail exactly right
Design and prototype thousands of screens with the accuracy needed to avoid costly downstream revisions.
Bring the thermostat’s design language to the app
Extend meaningful, on-brand interactions to the embedded device experience, not just the mobile app.
Speaking Nest’s language
Communication was critical on this project, especially working three time zones away from Nest with weekly delivery deadlines. Vervint’s team had to absorb an enormous amount of meticulous detail Nest’s own team knew intuitively, essentially learning to speak their language, moving, working, and talking like a true extension of the team. A small team of three had to stay on pace with Nest’s team of 30, all of whom were up against their own incredible deadlines, relying on daily check-ins and video calls to show work, get feedback, and stay in sync. Feedback from Nest was direct, concise, and comprehensive, exactly what a fast-moving project like this needed.
Precision at scale
With interactions to prototype and thousands of screens to deliver across a variety of devices, one inaccurate measurement could cascade into a world of revision pain, so the team balanced perfection with production, developing a consistent workflow with weekly deadlines and clear expectations to move confidently and quickly at the same time. On June 17, 2015, Nest launched a redesigned version of its app that brought together all three Nest products across multiple platforms for the first time, making it easier for customers to access and control everything in one place. A few months later, Nest released the third generation of its flagship thermostat, incorporating some of the meaningful, device-level interactions Vervint had helped design for the embedded experience.
With a design partnership built on speed, precision, and trust, Nest was equipped to bring its products together into one seamless experience, exactly the kind of simple, thoughtful design its customers had come to expect.
