Many of us within the connected devices group here at Mozilla couldn’t help but take a look at our own lives and experiences and wonder if there was a way we could help our busy families with the IoT. We have also challenged ourselves to pursue solutions that do more than provide a minor convenience. We want to have a deep and significant impact on our users’ lives.

What we’ve seen is busy families juggling schedules, tasks and lists, with much of the stress falling on working parents. How can we help them? We definitely don’t want to replace the role of mom or dad with a device, and we certainly couldn’t rely on technology to do that anyway. What if we could create a system that empowers everyone in the family to do their fair share, and give parents peace of mind, and more importantly, a less stressful day for everyone?

Enter Project Abigail, which for now we’re describing as a set of smart buttons that talk and listen to your family, so you can feel less busy and get more done. This concept is based on the premise that everyone already tries to share what they’re doing and what they need, for the most part, but much gets lost or overlooked, despite the piles of sticky notes and incomplete lists laying around the car, office and kitchen.

While we do our homework on the technical aspects of this system, and look at the results of some previously conducted studies with families for our other projects, we aim to put this idea in front of real people, in the wild. We’re going to be doing this via Facebook ads and a product landing page that describes Project Abigail with its various features and benefits. We’ll be measuring the engagement on our ads along with clicks on our website, where users can request to get early access and help us with further research.

Right now, this test is closed and only accessible if you’re lucky enough to be selected by Facebook’s ads system, but if you want to learn more about Project Abigail, you can visit our wiki page, or check back here when we’re ready to share the results of this test.

Meanwhile, we’ve shared below what we’re testing in front of a panel of users to see which features they might find the most useful. Feel free to comment below if you have any feedback!

–Preeti Sanketh
Product Manager, Project Abigail