Role: User Experience Designer
Duration: 16 Weeks
Team: Installation Team / 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineer Manager, 3 Developers
My Role in tado°
I worked as the User Experience Designer in the installation team, collaborating closely with the Product Manager and Engineers. I was primarily responsible for designing the installation flows for all tado° products. In addition to the installation experience within the tado° B2C App, I also focused on the tado° Professional App, aiming to improve the overall experience for installers.
Following a company restructuring, my responsibilities expanded to design for the whole tado° Heating App. I took over areas related to the core user experience for thermostat users—such as adjusting temperatures, geofencing settings, and more.
Project
Overview
A successful smart-home installation doesn’t end when the hardware is installed, it ends when customers feel confident taking ownership. This project redesigned the critical handover between professional installers and customers to create a smoother transition from installation to independent use.
Stakeholders
Throughout the project, I maintained close collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders to align design decisions, validate feasibility, and drive progress. I worked proactively with software engineers to identify technical constraints early, evaluate implementation trade-offs, and co-create practical solutions that balanced user needs with engineering realities. Regular collaboration with Product and Engineering leadership helped ensure alignment on business priorities, while bi-weekly design critiques provided valuable feedback to refine the experience and strengthen the overall solution.
Problems
The Challenge
"How might we increase the activation rate of newly installed homes by improving the installer-to-customers handover?"
The installation process wasn’t failing because of poor UI, it was failing because ownership ended at installation.
Installers considered their job complete once the devices were physically installed, while customers often hadn’t created an account yet or were unwilling to hand over their phone during the installation. As a result, customers left with a functioning heating system but without a clear understanding of their newly installed devices or how to manage them in the app.
Without a seamless handover, installers were also unable to assign newly installed devices to their correct rooms, making the initial setup even more difficult for customers.
This disconnect created a critical gap between installation and successful product adoption, directly impacting both installed-home activation and active user conversion.
The challenge wasn’t to redesign a screen. It was to design a seamless handover experience that bridged the gap between installers and customers, enabling customers to confidently activate and use their smart home from day one.
Problems
Ecosystem Map
The experience extended across multiple touchpoints: including installer and customer apps, connected devices, the cloud backend, and support. Because ownership of the handover was fragmented, onboarding frequently failed before customers could successfully activate their home.
Design Process
Workshop - Design Sprint
Rather than spending weeks in discovery, we ran a three-day cross-functional Design Sprint to quickly align stakeholders, validate assumptions, and establish a shared direction. This enabled the team to build organizational momentum and generate a testable hypothesis before moving into deeper design exploration and technical validation.
Research
To validate our assumptions, we defined the research objectives, recruited 4–5 professional installers for qualitative interviews, and synthesized the findings into actionable personas, key pain points, and an end-to-end installer-to-customer journey map. These insights established a shared understanding of where the handover experience was breaking down.
Ideation & Decision
Building on the research, each team member explored solution concepts through rapid sketching. I facilitated collaborative working sessions, synthesized feedback, and guided the team toward a single design direction that balanced user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility.
Design Process
Design Refinement
After the 3-day session, I refined the journey the group had sketched, mapped more pain points than the workshop had time to surface, and defined the happy-path flow.
Design
Installer App
For tado° Generation X, we introduced a dedicated Home Setup flow within the Installer App. It enabled installers to complete the entire installation workflow - from installing and configuring devices (e.g. assigning them to rooms) to handing over a fully configured smart home experience to the homeowner.
Design
Handover
Dedicated handover instructions are provided for both installers and homeowners to support a smooth and successful setup experience.
Design
tado° App
In the tado° App, homeowners can seamlessly import the pre-configured home setup created by the installer. By simply scanning a QR code provided during the handover, all configured rooms and assigned devices are transferred automatically.
This eliminates the need for customers to manually scan and organize each device, significantly reducing setup effort and enabling a much faster onboarding experience.
As part of the MVP, homeowners still needed to establish the connection for each device individually. We identified automatic device pairing as a future opportunity to further streamline the activation experience and reduce friction during first-time setup.
User Test
I translated key product assumptions into a structured usability testing plan, defining clear research objectives, hypotheses, and success metrics to validate the proposed solution.
During moderated usability sessions, I actively involved cross-functional stakeholders, encouraging Product and Engineering to observe firsthand, ask follow-up questions, and participate in note-taking. This fostered a shared understanding of user needs and grounded product decisions in real user feedback rather than technical assumptions.
Following each research round, I facilitated synthesis workshops to align on key insights, prioritize opportunities, evaluate technical constraints, and define the next iteration. These findings directly informed product decisions and established a clear roadmap for implementation.
Measuring Impact
After launch, we instrumented the experience with analytics events to measure the defined success metrics in production. By monitoring user behavior over time, we validated whether the design achieved its intended outcomes and identified further opportunities for optimization.
Key Takeaways
Working at tado° gave me the opportunity to own the entire product development lifecycle—from discovery and concept validation to delivery, launch, and post-launch measurement. Collaborating across two product teams also taught me how to quickly adapt to different product strategies, engineering workflows, and team cultures.
Cross-functional Product Development
Working in an IoT environment strengthened my ability to design across hardware and software. I collaborated closely with hardware designers, HVAC specialists, customer support, and engineers to create a seamless end-to-end installation experience, balancing user needs with physical and technical constraints.
Designing for Emerging Technologies
Designing for the new Matter-enabled product line challenged me to learn a new technology domain while considering interoperability, device ecosystems, and long-term scalability. It reinforced the importance of designing systems—not just interfaces.
Outcome-driven Product Thinking
One of the most valuable lessons was adopting an Opportunity Solution Tree approach. Rather than jumping directly to solutions, we aligned around measurable outcomes, validated assumptions through research, and continuously evaluated feature impact after launch. This fundamentally changed how I approach product design and prioritization.
Research as a Strategic Tool
Designing for a niche user group meant existing patterns could not simply be reused. I led qualitative research, synthesized behavioral insights, and validated concepts through iterative testing, helping shape one of the community’s most requested features. The project reinforced that strong research is not just about validating designs—it’s about uncovering opportunities that influence product strategy.
