Cubic.ai Smart Home mobile application development
Cubic.ai, formerly known as Cubic Robotics, is a mobile application for Smart Home voice control. Cubic allows to control lamps, thermostats, smoke detectors and other smart devices. Unlike competitors, Cubic manages the devices of competing brands, and also has a user-friendly interface.
The interface had been under development and support within 4 months.
During the work, tons of design examples and mock-ups were rejected. Dozens of drafts of the main screen are grounded in Sketch-files. Only few of them accepted for the release.
Main screen is a collection of all user’s devices, split for rooms.
Every device has its own icon, which can change its status. For example, Nest thermostats can heat or cool air in the room, so the thermostat is indicated with orange when heating and blue when cooling.
Thermostats of other brands can detect over-dried or supercooled air, and they need their own icons as well.
Some devices can possibly have full range of statuses. For example, smoke and CO detectors have 3 levels of warning for every kind of threat.
Cubic’s application supports dozens of different devices. Every device has many various conditions. And for every of these devices a pack of icons is designed specially for Cubic.
The hardest part of icons design is unification of their visual code. One device could possible show several parameters at the same time, like thermostats that show temperature, humidity and CO level. To make it harder, every of those parameters has up to 4 levels of warning. How that even possible to fit them all into a small icon? It took much time to find the answer, and many of rejected drafts.
Since it is impossible to remember all of the statuses for every device, the Dashboard screen comes to help.
Before the Dashboard design was finished, tons of drafts had been rejected.
At the very start we tried to create a completely different design of this screen to distinct it from the rest of the app. After some time we declined that idea and left only colours showing the main purpose — warning level.
On the Dashboard, the state of the house is indicated in an obvious way with many tooltips, like instruction for flood or fire.
If something happens, Cubic.ai notifies users with sound, and the Dashboard becomes red.
A set of interfaces is created for every device. We offered a few version for the Cubic team to choose.
At first, we wanted to distinct device control interfaces with colour too.
The team insisted on the classic one.
For lamps, too.
Despite the beautiful interface, Cubic’s main feature is voice control.
The Cube icon in the app is alive. You can press it and ask to turn off the light, make air a bit warmer in your room or question if the door is locked. Cubic’s speech recognition is far beyond its rivals.
For the future development, an interface for the voice assistant has been designed for Cubic. It is supposed to be invoked by pressing Home button on the phone.
For those users looking for a new smart devices to buy, a small online shop integrated in the app. You can order a brand-new gadget from the Internet of Things world directly from Amazon.
The design of the shop is different from the rest of the application. White background is selected because photos of goods are always on a white background.
For the same reason, you can not offer goods directly from your home screen.
