Jon Plummer

2013 IDEA Finalist, 2013 Silver UX Award

Wemo is a family of intelligent products for the home that allow you to control and see the status of switches, lights, and other devices, via your phone, from anywhere. We started with a plug-in switch module and a motion sensor, then quickly expanded to a power-measuring switch (Wemo Insight), a light switch, various LED lighting products, a heater, humidifier, and slow-cooker, and recently a dimmer. A smaller version of the original switch module, dubbed Wemo Mini, launched at the beginning of 2017.

My role: Made formative experience sketches for the product line that continue to govern the way the system operates, for better or worse. Formed the UX team with select members of my design staff and lead them into designing in a semi-Agile process in order to better integrate with the rapidly-forming software and cloud teams. Groomed one of their number to be the eventual UX manager for Wemo as a reorganization approached so I could turn my attention to rescuing the design and interactive components of the Linksys division.

Lessons learned: You must be clear what the core of your product is, lest you dilute your message in your eagerness to expand the product line. Inappropriate product partners make for messy divorces and disappointed children/employees. People notice if you fail to refresh visually, even as functionality continues to expand.

An in-home study requiring participants to replace their existing router with one of three Belkin routers showed us that we had a lot of work to do. People surprised us at every turn, losing instructions, getting turned around in instructions, not understanding which cable was which, plugging things into the wrong places, etc. One nice lady even plugged the power supply cable into the headphone jack on her computer, because it sort of looked like it belonged there and she had missed the step where she was to give power to the new router.

Removing opportunities for mistakes became the order of the day. An order-tolerant setup process, pre-connected cables, and instructions directly on the parts in question scored very well when tested in the lab and among the public when sold. Setup-related support calls were reduced significantly and an entire class of wiring-related calls went nearly to zero.

In addition, we removed several opportunities for mistakes or confusion by shipping the router pre-secured, with a network name and password printed on a card. This could be changed by users at any time or during setup, and included blanks on the back to write their new settings if desired. Later routers included a slot on the foot for the card to be stored. This card significantly reduced the volume of “what’s my network password” support calls.

My role: lead designer and usability tester, led diagnostic in-home studies, cajoled Customer Care to analyze and report call data in ways that could spur action among Design and Product Management

Lessons learned: there’s always room to reduce opportunities for mistakes. User attention is fragile and singular; you can direct it where you need to, but not too many times. The emotional support role of a setup process dare not be neglected; when done well it inspires confidence in your product. When done poorly the person may not believe your product is working well even when it is.

I served on the Belkin Values committee with the CEO, VP of Design, VP of Human Resources, and another designer, with the guidance of the Emotive Brand agency from San Francisco. We aimed to overturn Belkin’s prior very pedestrian brand and values statements in favor of discovered values, in-place already, that we felt represented strengths worth emphasizing. It was a grueling process but these values are in use every day and form a meaningful portion of employee evaluations.

My favorite is “pursue the ideal,” which acknowledges that the ideal is out of reach, and does not ask for optimization of your small area of the business but instead for you to stretch with others to identify and get ever closer to a shared ideal.

Each value is succinct and memorable, and supported by the others.

A skunkworks project to make a wearable remote for an insulin pump and glucose sensor, based on an existing LCD driver with limited segment count, led naturally to wondering: what if it were really a watch, that looked and worked like a watch?

In 2006 this was a fairly radical thought, especially the digital crown and repurposing existing analog watch behaviors for everyday control.

The initial impulse behind this project was to use a controller capable of driving a limited number of segments (I think it was around 170 segments) to make a watch-like object.

Along the way I experimented with digital watch-style multi-button control methods as well, but since a working prototype was never made the results were never usability-tested. I did make a non-functional physical prototype much in the manner of an old-school piano practice board.

My role: concepts, interactive specifications, hallway testing with interested employees who were also patients

Lessons learned: there’s no substitute for a prototype of any fidelity, and designing for fixed segments is a much different and more limiting beast than pixel-based displays.

As a demonstration and educational tool, and to preview to executives anticipated sensor data analysis capabilities, we made a Windows application that simulated three typical insulin-dependent diabetic patients. One could elect to be the physician, reviewing three days of the patient’s recent history and making adjustments  to insulin pump settings to improve their care, or choose to be the patient, selecting meals and insulin dosages over a two day period and seeing how your blood glucose responded to your choices.

My role: concept, interaction and visual design, patient selection and operationalization, and numerous demonstrations to executives, visiting endocrinologists, and community groups

Lessons learned: A skilled, flexible developer and a designer who listens can make an experiment into something special, if they are both grounded in the subject matter.

A patient with an insulin pump and a glucose monitor has health data positively streaming off of them, yet endocrinologists typically struggled with the reports they were given, often relying on cruder measures to make behavioral recommendations and rough adjustments to pump settings between quarterly visits. Direct research with five endocrinology offices, which later became a lead user program with two doctors in one office, helped us create a new set of reports aimed squarely at answering key clinical questions and showing patient behavior and results together.

Central to these reports is the idea that as a patient takes more fingersticks the analysis should begin to approach that which is possible with a sensor; with a sensor a detailed train of behavior and results should be made clear and scannable.

New (and patented) at this time was a report detailing the adherence level of the patient, a key first glance that suggested to the physician how likely the later reports would be helpful.

Patents (of the type we called “amateur endocrinologists” during our research) have also come to love these reports that are aimed at professionals: https://rollinginthed.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/the-hook-brings-you-back/

My role: research, collection of live patient data, iterative design and testing of report design alternatives with endocrinologists and other physicians, functional specifications

Lessons learned: too-frequent contact with busy physicians can annoy them, but if you actually meet their needs they will adopt your product wholeheartedly and all will be forgiven. Physicians are smart and learned but can’t remember everything, so sometimes will have remembered outdated or incorrect lessons of the past. Leading them away from error with data and good design is more effective than arguing with them.

While working on the identity and without any experience marketing a business, I proposed and was given the greenlight to redesign the Mann Consulting website. A relatively clean and sparse site was the result, with a handful of randomly selected “single-sell” main graphics, a proto-blog, and a small number of tightly-focused pages, all aimed at explaining the benefit and encouraging a phone call.

The winning design and identity:

My role: pitch, concepts, visual design, HTML and graphics production

Some other possibilities, with a provisional identity: