Every screen answers a finding
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The largest, brightest, only-yellow button on the screen is “Service Dealer” — which is just an account information page. Visual weight runs exactly opposite to actual importance.
→ The redesign makes the current temperature the single anchor and files account info under Settings.List items on the left are rectangular while the buttons on the right are pill-shaped — two UI languages on one screen. Devices are named by model number: “7 Day Commercial 7320” asks the user to remember which unit is in which room.
→ One component language, plus custom device names — a fix traced directly to Pro1 in the competitive analysis.A bare “?” floats in the bottom-right corner with no border and no label. In testing, not one participant realized it was tappable.
→ Help became a labelled, permanent destination in the bottom navigation bar.Temperature moves one degree per tap through arrow buttons, with no way to type a number. Going from 60°F to 75°F takes fifteen taps.
→ The redesign keeps ± but adds a draggable ring with both bounds visible at once.“Following Program,” “Occupied Schedule,” “Hold” — HVAC trade language throughout. One participant, verbatim: “Permanent hold sounds scary… what's permanent?”
→ Rewritten in plain life language: Cooling → 72°F, wake up, leave home, return home, sleep.Both screens are landscape because the entire app forces landscape orientation — in a world where nearly everyone holds a phone upright. It was the fastest agreement we reached in the evaluation, and the starting point for deciding that a redesign was cheaper than a patch.
On the old home screen every button was the same size and color, with no hierarchy. Here the current temperature is the single visual anchor, with heating and cooling read off one continuous ring in the brand's semantic colors. “Feels like” and humidity were called out by name in testing as moments of clarity — they translate raw data into something a person reads instantly.
Scheduling scored 4.48 out of 5 in the survey and was simultaneously the loudest complaint in the open-ended responses — a satisfied majority hiding a badly frustrated minority. The old version buried it in a multi-layer calendar where users had to guess how weekly and monthly differ. Here the schedule is anchored to life events — wake up, leave home, return home, sleep — with the time and the temperature on the same line.
Energy reports are the strongest behavior driver in the survey (51%) and simultaneously carry the highest non-use rate (15%). The old version emailed you a CSV — you had to leave the app to read it. Here it lives inside the app with a neighborhood comparison, and the clinical name “Data Reports” became “Smart Report,” a rename participants proposed themselves.
This is the screen I care most about. The old app returned a code when connection failed — thermostat, router, internet, phone, and it never said which link broke. Here the failure is split into three symptoms a user can recognize as their own, and “Contact Support” sits at the bottom in the lightest possible treatment: still there, no longer the only way out.