CASE STUDY
A Smart Home for All
Introducing CYNC, a new brand of smart home products.
THE CHALLENGE
GE Lighting aspired to move away from white-label solutions and develop a smart home brand from the ground up. They needed a partner to help them identify, define, and develop their portfolio of products to transform them into a smart home powerhouse.
OUR RESPONSE
Balance Innovation developed a research strategy and action plan to learn, first-hand, the jobs that smart home power users needed to get done throughout their journey from novice to enthusiast. This learning produced a core set of tools the design teams used to develop the full line of smart home products and a new brand, CYNC, with a laser focus on the core needs of its customers and users.
To accomplish this, Balance:
Developed a research strategy.
Conducted in-depth, contextual interviews with smart home enthusiasts in their homes.
Identified underserved and unmet needs translated into personas, user requirements, and creative constraints to inform the conceptualization and design of smart home products.
Facilitated highly focused and structured ideation to develop product feature ideas.
Developed detailed solution concepts to communicate the value of the proposed features.
Defined, designed, and developed the full line of 13 CYNC products.
THE RESULT
The CYNC platform and products were built from the ground up, starting with a smart light switch and evolving into a fully integrated platform of lights, cameras, and controllers.
The system's core value is that it doesn’t require a hub and could be set up by a first-time smart home product user using only their smartphone. This was a novel accomplishment at the time. Our research also uncovered that a large group of people wanting to build a smart home couldn’t because the wiring in their house was too old. This motivated the GE team to develop the first 3-wire smart light switch to support these people with older wiring.
During our ongoing partnership with GE Lighting, they were acquired by Savant, a leading luxury smart home solutions provider. The CYNC brand redefined the GE Lighting brand from the inventor of the light bulb to a smart home powerhouse for the masses.