Designing the future of home energy management
All the way from launching a secret startup to scaling an app for a growing product portfolio.
What is Aira?
With residential heating as one of the biggest CO2 emitters, Aira is on a mission to decarbonise Europe.
By replacing old gas boilers with heat pumps the goal is to make heating up the house and domestic water smarter. Solar panels and batteries added to the setup optimises the use of electricity and reduce dependency of the grid.
What is the product?
An Aira user has bought a home energy management system (HEMS) to monitor and control the heating of their home and domestic water.
The full system consists of a set of hardware pieces:
a heat pump placed outside the home
an indoor unit with a domestic hot water tank
solar panels
a battery
The system is controlled and monitored through the Aira Home app. This is where I come in.
My time at Aira
I joined Aira as the first designer in August 2022 before Aira as a brand even existed. We were a few people crammed up in a small office space in central Stockholm.
Building the website
For the first year I was part of the web team, responsible for conversion and making people want to buy the product we were offering.
Focussing on:
conversion design for web
building a design system from scratch
building a CMS for the airahome.com website
localisation for three different markets (Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom)
Moving to the app team
After a year of hard and stressful work I decided to move to the app team to help them scale the app experience. When I joined, the app had not yet been released to any users and the status of the app was about “good enough” with core functionality in place for managing the heat pump and water tank only.
Now, the app has grown into being the core interface for users to interact with their system, to follow up on performance and to make adjustments to optimise for their needs. The system has been expanded to also include solar panels and batteries.
Focus has been on:
building upon the core functionality with requested features and settings
shifting (and expanding) focus of the app from a heat pump app to a home energy management app
maintaining the app design system
localisation for three different markets (Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom)
What I have worked on
I have often found myself working on multiple different things at once and with no clear project definition as “things move fast in a startup setting”. I have therefore collected reflections on the work I have done during my time at Aira.
How to build a web and acquisition flow from scratch for a secret startup that didn’t really know what they were about to sell or how.
Product images from https://www.airahome.com/