SimpliSafe —Scheduled Arming
Solving for forgetfulness and increasing arming engagement by 22%
Role
Product Designer
Team
1 PM, 1 engineer
Duration
1 week
CONTEXT
"It's 6am and the wife forgets the system is armed and opens a door and the siren goes on waking you and your kids up in a massive panic...that's what I'm trying to avoid."
A top complaint in our user forum at SimpliSafe was that users would constantly forget to arm or disarm their systems, leading to either false alarms or lack of coverage. Meanwhile, we saw in the data that users who armed their systems 5x a week were more likely to remain subscribed customers.
THE SOLUTION
A scheduled arming feature
I moved fast to create designs based off of existing patterns.
After launch, we noticed that users were deleting and re-making their schedule when they were on vacation, so we also introduced the ability to toggle schedules on and off:
IMPACT
+22% users arming weekly, +58% users arming 5x/week
Next steps/Open questions:
Keep an eye on secondary metrics — how does this impact our false alarm rate?
Explore an more seamless experience — for example, via geofencing.
Do automated arms prevent churn as much as “manual” arms? [Update 2025 — Yes they do!]
REFLECTIONS
Be intentional & critical about what design tools and processes we’re using, depending on what we’re trying to validate.
This was a very quick initiative, yet it had an immense impact, even though I solely relied on existing patterns and minimal research.
Shipping to learn: get the design to a place where it can de-risk an assumption.
There’s tremendous value in moving fast.