Vivint 2025
Helping users understand home activity
With over 350,000 unique users per day, ‘Activity’ is the second most-visited tab in the Vivint app. It logs events from a user’s smart home systems to help them understand activity in and around their homes. This project is a re-imagining of the existing activity feed designed to better serve customer needs.
My role
Lead UX designer
Project type
Product design
Discovery research
Problem
The activity feed was built during the first generation of the Vivint App before user needs for the feed were fully understood or considered.
Proposal
Clarify user goals in the feed and design an experience that helps users accomplish them.
We had a feed... but not a very helpful one
The old feed was full of text walls, thousands of motion detections, and identical thumbnails with no easy way to sort through it all. It was a nightmare to find an event you were looking for, let alone piece together the story of what happened.
The new feed introduces hierarchy, filtering, and scan-ability to support user goals.
Impact & Results
The redesign had a major impact on engagement and stickiness—especially for users who were previously less active. Since less engaged users are 2.5X more likely to attrit, boosting engagement in this group by 75% had an estimated increase of ~$3M in annual revenue.
21%
Increase in feature stickiness
75%
Increase in engagement among less active users
8%
Increase in Daily Active Users
Discovery Research & Insights
Understanding user needs
We began with discovery research to understand the questions users have about activity in their homes. Partnering with the Research and Insights team, I developed discussion guides and led interviews to uncover what activity users want to know about, how they access that information, and their overall experience finding it.
Whimsical concept testing
To explore user thinking, I created a set of “wild” design concepts inspired by our Industrial Design team’s process.
The goal wasn’t to ship them, but to spark conversation and reveal how users understand home activity: do they think about it in space or over time? How much context from other systems do they need?
Insights that shaped the feed
We found 3 high-level tasks customers used the feed for:
Verify
that an event that was supposed to happen, did happen
Explore
general activity in the home
Investigate
details about an event
Exploring concepts
Each user story I explored a variety of concepts to address user needs. I took these concepts through reviews with the larger design team to decide on the best approach for each concept
Iterating in phases
Traditionally, Vivint followed a waterfall product development process, even in software development. This project was one of the first to embrace agile- taking small, iterative steps toward a better product. By incorporating real customer feedback along the way, we were able to make informed decisions and deliver value faster.
MVP Release
We started with 3 simple changes to the feed to support users
Explore
De-cluttered events
Filtering out unhelpful events keeps the feed clean and focused on relevant activity.
Motion detections
HVAC kicking on/off
Lights dimmed or turned on/off
Investigate
Verify
Easy filtering
Filtering by date, devices, and commonly investigated events makes it easier for users to find specific events.
Explore
Verify
Investigate
Visual refresh
The new feed features a visual redesign that makes it more functional and beautiful.
Icons & touches of color
Larger thumbnails
More white space
Phase 2: Telling the whole story
The second phase focused on answering questions more directly rather than putting the burden on the user to piece together what happened.
...More Discovery Research & whimsical concept testing
The MV
Phase 2: Event grouping
We started with 3 simple changes to the feed to support users
Investigate
Verify
Grouped events
Related system events are grouped into a cohesive story to directly communicate what happened rather than putting the burden on the user to piece things together.
Investigate
Alarm Summaries
Unrelated, repeated system events now stack to de-clutter the feed while still communicating what happened.
Reflections
What I learned
This project strengthened my ability to lead end-to-end, research-driven design while collaborating across teams and verticals. The biggest challenge was adapting my designs to an agile development process and helping establish this workflow within Vivint.
What I would do differently
This project introduced me to the power of in-production variant testing. We eventually adjusted some design details using data from Mixpanel, but I wish we had done these as tests from the start!
Impact & Results
21%
Increase in feature stickiness
75%
Increase in engagement among less active users
$3M
Estimated annual revenue increase