SmartThings 3.0 UI Guidelines

Several smart-home apps had just been folded into one. Everything arrived at once and none of it had been introduced.

Products and functions that had lived in separate apps now shared a single structure, and the structure showed the strain.

The guideline had to decide what all these devices have in common before it could decide how they look. A flow and an information structure that hold whether the thing on the other end is a television or a door lock.

The 3.0 guidelines set the rules across the whole app. Having worked on it since the pilot, we knew why the earlier decisions were made and could move them rather than guess at them.