Case study / 2023
Designed for local, with a global standard.
Team
Design lead & project manager
UI designer / illustrator, researcher, UX designer
Panasonic IIC, Tata Elxsi, and an external research agency
Background
Miraie needed to make connected-home control feel useful on day one for Indian households, while still creating space for automation, analytics, and appliance intelligence over time.
A user-friendly digital experience that blends familiar physical cues with a gradual path into new technology.
01 / Process
The work moved between research, product constraints, workflow mapping, and sprint reviews. That rhythm gave Panasonic and its partners a shared way to turn insight into interface decisions before screens became polished.
02 / Research
Home visits and interviews separated people into active, passive, and power users. Simple defaults and reassurance supported new adopters, while automation, diagnostics, and analytics remained available when people were ready for more.
03 / Interaction model
The product hierarchy made everyday actions immediate while keeping the system capable. Users could control a device in the moment, understand its status, and build routines without being asked to learn every capability at once.
04 / Journey
Mapping daily moments revealed when the interface should stay quiet, show status, or invite a person into a richer routine. It shifted the experience from a list of appliance features into a system that followed real household behaviour.
05 / Alignment
Leadership sessions turned appliance functions into flows, wireframes, and workshop artefacts. Device capability, marketing goals, research findings, and interface delivery could then converge around one clear product story.
06 / Adoption
Market and marketing inputs kept the experience grounded in how Miraie would be introduced. The first visit had to prove useful immediately; advanced capability could reveal itself through repeat use rather than configuration overload.
07 / Field research
Families already had rhythms for checking, sharing, and controlling devices. Those observations protected the product from becoming a generic dashboard and gave device status, room context, and repeated actions a more natural place in the interface.
08 / Feedback
The interaction language focused on timely status and next-best actions. Notifications were treated as a part of the product’s calm guidance system, not a competing channel demanding attention.
09 / Validation
We tested familiar ideas such as switchboards, thermostats, appliance states, and room-based controls. Familiarity was not decoration—it gave people a recognizable path into digital control without making the interface feel dated.
10 / Familiar objects
Soft physical cues made switchboards, thermostats, and appliance states feel easier to approach. They acted as an onboarding bridge: clear enough for a first-time user, flexible enough for a connected-home system to grow beyond them.
11 / Widgets
Layered widgets separated primary controls from secondary options. Passive users could act with confidence, active users could repeat routine controls quickly, and power users could step into deeper tools when they needed them.
12 / Navigation
Layered gestures gave people direct access to rooms and smart items, with clear feedback at every step. The experience made common actions feel nearly invisible while preserving a sense of location and control.
