OnboardingRevamp
Duration:
6 months (2025 Q2-Q3)
Teams:
CXD Noida & CRI Bangalore
Role:
Benchmarking, user flows, visual design, Device illustrations, motion design
What is it?
Context
First impressions in a smart home app are load-bearing. If onboarding a device takes too long, asks too much, or fails silently, users don't retry, they disengage. The Havells One onboarding experience had exactly this problem. Setting up a smart device required users to manually identify their device, follow model-specific reset instructions, and multiple configuration steps that felt technical and unintuitive.
Why it exists?
Problem Statement
The original Havells One smart device onboarding required multiple manual steps, device selection, and reset step configuration, leading to friction during first-time setup. This complexity increased drop-offs, delayed time-to-value, and made the experience feel unintuitive, especially for users expecting quick, seamless control of their devices.
Original device onboarding user flow in Havells One app.
Who is it for?
Competitor Study
Before redesigning the flow, we needed to understand the standard users were already being held to. We conducted a structured competitor study across leading smart home platforms: LG ThinQ, Samsung SmartThings, Gubo, Philips, Tapo, and Wiz evaluating each on device pairing speed, discovery method, step count, error handling, and the quality of feedback during setup.
The pattern that emerged was consistent: the best-in-class experiences shared three traits. They surfaced nearby devices automatically rather than asking users to identify them manually. They reduced visible step count by bundling permissions and confirmations into the flow rather than front-loading them as gates. And they used clear, device-specific feedback: animations, illustrations, status indicators — to communicate what was happening during the wait, rather than showing a generic loading spinner.
Insights
These insights shaped three north stars for the revamp: automatic discovery over manual selection, progressive permission handling, and meaningful & contextual wait UX.
What we chose?
Design Trade offs
Speed of discovery vs accuracy of device identification
To enable fast onboarding, we designed the system to auto-detect nearby Havells devices over BLE and surface them immediately. The trade-off is that proximity-based discovery isn't perfectly selective, a fan might surface before the air purifier the user actually wants to connect.
Rather than slowing discovery to improve accuracy, we accepted this trade-off and provided clear fallbacks:
a re-scan option and manual search for users who need it. The default experience stays fast; the fallback exists for the edge case.
Seamless detection vs ownership verification
BLE discovery doesn't respect property lines. A device belonging to a neighbour can surface alongside your own, which creates a real risk of incorrect onboarding. Rather than disabling auto-detection, we introduced a lightweight ownership verification step a physical confirmation that the user is in possession of the device, typically a button press.
This adds one step, but it's a step with clear purpose: it protects users from a genuinely frustrating error state, and it communicates that the system is being careful on their behalf.
What we built?
Solution
The revamped onboarding experience introduces a one-tap, BLE (Bluetooth Low energy)-powered device discovery flow that automatically detects nearby Havells devices and surfaces them instantly, eliminating the need for manual selection and complex setup steps. The system is designed to minimize friction by guiding users through a fast, intuitive flow with clear feedback at each stage, while also handling real-world scenarios through re-scan options and ownership verification.
By combining speed with reliability, the solution enables users to connect and start using their devices within seconds, significantly improving the first-time experience and accelerating time-to-value.
User Permissions
Happy flow
Feedback
Device cards Illustrations
Device cards were a significant visual design workstream in their own right. Each connected device needed a card that communicated device type, connection status, and available controls at a glance. We created a full library of device illustrations that were visually consistent, immediately recognisable, and designed to work across the range of Havells hardware.
These illustrations became the primary visual identity of the connected home experience inside the app.
Motion Design: Wait state
One of the most underinvested areas in the original flow was the wait state — the time between a user initiating an action and the system completing it. In the old experience, this was a spinner. In the new one, it became a design opportunity.
Wait UX was a dedicated work stream in this project because we knew that perceived speed matters as much as actual speed.
A 4-second wait with clear, purposeful animation feels faster than a 2-second wait with a generic loader. We designed device-specific loading states that showed the device being scanned, found, and connected — giving users a continuous sense of progress rather than a black box.
What changed?
Key metrics
The revamped flow reduced setup step count from [X] steps to [X], cutting the cognitive load of first-time onboarding significantly. Time-to-value — from app open to first device controlled — dropped from an average of [X] minutes to under [X] seconds in the happy path. Drop-off during onboarding decreased by [X]%, and first-session device connection rate improved to [X]%.
The device card illustration system shipped as a scalable asset library, covering [X] device types and establishing a visual language for hardware representation that has since been extended across other surfaces in the Havells One App.
