Competition is heating up

[peepeep]

@jrodricks

The community has been all but begging Wyze to focus on improving the app and the user experience instead of expending their hardware lineup.

From Senior Director of Technology & Services, @Frederik, about six months ago:

@Frederik

I don’t see how they’ll be able to continue rapidly expanding features without forcing people to adapt to a changing interface (or forego updates, which has its own drawbacks.)

We won’t and we are thinking about that. The approach to UX was one thing when we had one product: 1 camera. When you launch the camera, we know what you want to do: use the camera. But when you have not one but many cameras, sensors, bulbs and plugs then it becomes very difficult to know why you are coming in the app. There is also people like me: with many cameras in their house. (about 15 including in & out of the house). The amount of video produced per day is beyond what can be reviewed by watching the videos.
We also have something different coming. While the devices that we have brought to market so far are dedicated to the home, there are two devices that are personal in nature. The mobile phone and the upcoming scale.
This means that we have to change how we are approaching the app and what it means to use the app. The challenge is that for the customers that have one camera, or a couple of bulbs, we should not have a very complicated UX, the simplicity that we had when we launched the app should still be there BUT the UX should allow to take on the complexity of customers with a very large set of the devices (in quantity and diversity).
So what are we doing? First, we realize that the original team was stretched beyond limit. So we more than triple the number of designers that are working on creating your Wyze experience. We also are rethinking the app from the bottom up. We started 6 months ago but hit an impasse. So we double down and are hard at work in creating the next version of it and we are starting to get some pretty interesting lessons.
One is that to unlock and contextualize the devices, we will need to augment the quantity of organizing concepts.
For example, we are looking at the notion of Home because for some automation we need to know if the user is home or close to home and what are the devices that are at that location.
Another lesson is that being device centric makes some of the UX difficult because you might jump from one device to the next when trying to do something. For example, a doorbell, a contact sensor and a lock might be working in tandem when someone is at the door.
So we are looking at all those challenges and trying to create the best UX possible.