Motorola Loop

How do you use a smartphone to teach a smart home?

Role: Group Creative Director | Agency: Manifest

For a high-profile launch of the Droid smartphone, Motorola asked Manifest to create a proprietary app for their Verizon customers. We wanted to highlight and complement the phones unique features, which allowed family users to connect with each other and manage their home in smart, new ways.

Challenge

Discover and define what users needed most, then build it into a cool, brand differentiating smart app.

Questions

What did families want or need? How could a Droid help connect them beyond the obvious text or call?

We conducted exhaustive user research, including 61 unique interviews and secondary consumer and industry research, and found that families were really looking for an easy way to manage the safety and functions (heat/air) of their home, while away from it. 

Partnership

We then worked with our partners to best understand the unique features of the phone to better understand how the phone’s unique features could best serve the audiences need. 

We began development with an Agile methodology, assessing direction and development throughout and using 23 two-week sprints to get us there.

Prototypes

15 early prototypes were built, with a final working prototype selected and constantly updated through out the rest of build.

By week nine, longitudinal beta testing began and we created a Google+ community. This made real-time feedback visible to both our testers and product and engineering teams alike, allowing us to optimize our timeline.