Norwegian Smart Home

As technology and smart technology continues to become an integral part of our daily lives it can be challenging to adapt, both as consumers and as designers. Connected technology in your home could be perceived as intrusive, and many worry about complexity, security, and privacy. For Datek, it was important to design a smart home that would be accessible- and appeal to everyone, not just technologists and other early adopters. For that reason, our goal was to design a product series that would fit in well in any Norwegian home. 

Datek’s competence lies in the development of technology, with core expertise in electronics, hardware, and software. Throughout the project, we worked closely with their engineers to adapt their technical format to design the best form factor.

Even though this project required all digital communication, exchanging data, ideation, and decision-making processes ran smooth, in a qualitative, structured, and efficient matter. 

Make it blend.

In the design process, we presented a large selection of design concepts and presented the idea to make the design blend into its environment as much as possible. We wanted to move forward with a solution that characterized the products with a friendly expression, and not technical.  

With this friendly expression, it was also important that the products had a strong family resemblance. This is portrayed by the smooth curved top and silhouette – also an important feature in the objective of making the products blend seamlessly and not attract attention as many tech products do. 

Building the foundation for good user experience

In a fast expanding market with many new innovations, a lot of users will experience new products and services for the first time ever. Combined with the fact that smart technology will, to some extent, be integrated in all our lives – a fool-proof and intuitive service for purchase, installation, in addition to the general user experience for the app, is crucial for a positive user experience.

Our scope was to build a foundation on which further decision-making for the app and service could be done in correspondence with identified user needs and value propositions.

We ran four digital UX workshops, incorporating tools and methods like journey maps, affinity diagrams, and value proposition canvas. Thanks to Datek’s enthusiasm and ability to cooperate, it was an overwhelming success and we gathered valuable data for us to translate into user groups, value propositions, and other assessments. 

The service- and user experience project ran as an Eker Express project, as part of the bigger collaboration between Eker Design and Datek Smart Home to bring Norwegian-made smart homes to market.

Renders and visualizations by Eker Design

Did you miss this? Norwegian-developed world-class technology for Smart Homes by Datek