Lutron In-Store Showroom

Lutron is an electronics company that offers smart dimmers and lighting and shade control solutions. We worked with them to create a new service that would add value to both Lutron and their various stakeholders.

Problem: A lack of awareness and knowledge has become a barrier to experiencing all the benefits from smart products like Lutron’s shades and lighting. Simply put, customers don’t know they want these solutions until they see them in action. However, they currently learn and experience this technology well before they actually are prepared and able to buy it.

Solution: We created a service that positions Lutron in the showrooms of furniture stores. By partnering with a furniture store, Lutron can leverage their experiential showrooms, and allow these shoppers, who already have the intention of investing in their homes, the opportunity to learn about Lutron, experience the benefits of smart lighting and shading in context, and buy the products and smart system all at once. This service allows customers to experience Lutron products and immediately purchase them, when they are most excited about the products, as well as eliminates the anxiety of buying just to try.

Impact: “Your problem statement is right on. A lot of times people don’t know what they want or understand why they would want it until they see it and experience it, so I love your idea of introducing our products when people are making purchases for their home.” - Senior UX Designer at Lutron

Lutron is a product-centric company that is looking to expand on their service offerings. Our challenge was to analyze the current Lutron product-service system; conduct research to identify unmet or underserved needs of existing customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders; and design a new service that addresses those needs and creates value.

I made significant contributions at all stages of the design process for this project. I led team meetings and the distribution of work from initial research through final deliverables, and did overall quality checks at each iteration. I also facilitated the team discussions and decision-making to move the project forward, managing team members’ contributions and aligning them with the project goals.

> Brady Baldwin
> Sewon Park
> Erick Valencia

One of our first considerations was the servicescapes of the stores Lutron products were being sold in. We wanted to investigate how this touchpoint is designed and speak with employees at home improvement stores such as Lowe’s and Home Depot.

We also realized that real estate could be a promising research direction. By speaking with homeowners and real estate professionals, we could learn about how important smart lighting and shading is to a home, as well as if there are any recent or upcoming trends in smart home products. I recruited five people (three homeowners and two real estate agents) and conducted semi-structured interviews with them to get their thoughts on smart lighting and shades.

We also spoke with members of Lutron’s UX team to learn what they had found to be the biggest pain points for their customers, their other stakeholders, and themselves.

We found a common theme across all of our research: potential customers don’t know they want these products yet. They only look into buying them after they have experienced them themselves.

However, we didn’t immediately narrow down on this problem. It wasn’t until we did some rapid ideation using a creative matrix that we realized how strong this problem statement was. The creative matrix was new to me, but it proved to be a beneficial method that helped us sort through our research findings.

This exercise led us to the realization that utilizing an in-store showroom to showcase the benefits of smart home products was a solution that perfectly matched the strongest pain point we found.

Customers want these products; they just don’t know they want them until they see them in action, and even better, in context. To address this gap, we proposed placing Lutron in the showrooms of furniture stores. Customers, who are already out shopping for their homes and looking to upgrade, can discover Lutron’s smart lighting and shading and see it in the environment that it will ultimately be placed in. They will be able to try it and determine if they like it, and then buy it immediately, when they are most excited about it.


Our solution involves a few key service design concepts:

> customer and employee management: We wanted to make the experience self-guided—reduce the reliance on employees to be in each showroom, but still be able to leverage them for more detailed questions and customization.
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> servicescape: We designed the environment to help with this customer and employee management. Customers would read signs placed in the showrooms near devices, which they could use to play with the Lutron system, in order to learn and experience everything themselves as they walked through the showrooms. Employees would be available throughout the store, as they currently are, for more detailed questions.
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> service as a performance: As customers interact with the showrooms and the Lutron systems in them, they are performing for other shoppers nearby. More people are attracted to the display, and they can see the benefits without interacting with it themselves at all.

We pitched this to other designers, as well as members of the Lutron UX team. I used an outline that a team member had created to create the slide deck. I also created the models to make our points more visual and digestible, as well as wrote the script and helped present.