01 · The problem
New ground, where nothing agreed with anything
In 2015 there was no settled way to do any of this. The category was heavily segmented and every manufacturer had its own conventions: its own pairing flow, its own idea of what a device could report, its own vocabulary for the same physical object.
Iris sat on top of all of it. Dozens of brands and hundreds of devices with varying capabilities, presented as one coherent product.
That is a capability problem before it is a visual one. A dimmer that reports brightness and a dimmer that only reports on or off need to feel like the same control, right up until the moment the difference matters to the person using it.
02 · What I owned
Visual design, under a senior designer who owned the thinking
I want to be accurate about the split, because this was early in my career. I heavily supported the senior designer on Iris. He handled the big thinking and the strategy. Visual design was mine and I had control over it. He was there for guidance throughout, but the visual work was largely left to me.
That covered the design system, wireframes and prototypes across web and mobile, along with the style guides, assets and marketing materials that kept everything consistent. All of it was built for Iris specifically rather than for Lowe's more broadly.
It was a good way to learn the job: enough ownership that the decisions were real, enough supervision that the strategy behind them was sound.
