The Nest Thermostat

The thermostat had not been redesigned in decades. It was beige, plastic, and universally hated, and studies suggested most people never bothered to program theirs at all, wasting energy by default because the interface was so bad they gave up. Then two former Apple engineers who had worked on the iPod and iPhone, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, decided to fix it in 2010. They built a brushed metal circle people actually wanted to show their friends. Four years later Google paid about $3.2 billion for the company.

For anyone building a product, this is a case about the boring, frustrating touchpoint in your business that nobody has bothered to fix precisely because it is boring. It sharpens the question of what that touchpoint would look like if it worked the way a user actually behaves rather than the way your process assumes they do. What Nest changed to turn a hated commodity into something people loved is the part the app saves for you.