Overview
Domus is a mobile application designed to manage the connected home in a more intuitive, vibrant, and friendly way. It brings together lights, climate, security, appliances, and outdoor systems into a unified experience that feels simple and approachable. Its purpose is to bring clarity and a touch of personality to everyday home automation, turning technical tasks into interactions that are more pleasant and playful.
The project explores how a gentle visual language, clear feedback, and a hint of visual humor can bring warmth to an environment that is traditionally neutral and functional. Domus proposes a more expressive relationship with the connected home—reliable, accessible, and designed to blend naturally with the real rhythms of everyday life.
Role
Timeframe
Type
Tools
Context
The connected home has evolved quickly, yet the overall experience remains fragmented and not very expressive. The proliferation of devices and applications has created an ecosystem that is functional but technical and distant, where everyday actions can feel more complex than they should be.
As technology reaches into every corner of the home, the need for clearer, more accessible, and more approachable solutions grows. It is no longer about connecting more objects, but about making interaction feel natural and pleasant, seamlessly integrated into daily life.
Problem
Although smart-home technology promises comfort and control, the real experience often feels confusing, distant, and overly technical. Interfaces lack warmth and personality; interactions are not always intuitive; and the proliferation of devices and apps can create uncertainty for users of different ages and levels of technological familiarity.
At times, even small actions can raise doubts about whether one is making the right adjustment. Overall, the connected-home experience often comes across as more serious and less expressive than it needs to be.
Project Goal
Domus aims to redefine the connected-home experience through an interface that is clear, coherent, and emotionally accessible.
The project seeks to reduce the friction inherent in managing multiple devices, while introducing a more expressive visual language that brings warmth and personality to everyday interactions.
Beyond simplifying tasks, Domus aspires to unify the user’s relationship with their home in an environment that builds trust, supports understanding, and turns technical actions into intuitive, pleasant moments.
At its core, it proposes a more human, clearer, and more harmonious way of living with smart-home technology.
Research Overview
The research combined desk research, a competitive analysis, and four short interviews to understand how people interact with smart-home systems and what challenges they face in everyday use. The main goal was to identify patterns of confusion, fragmentation, and technical overload, as well as to explore what users expect from a clearer and more human-centered smart-home experience.
This process revealed shared needs: improving comprehension, unifying the experience across devices, and making home technology feel more friendly, accessible, and trustworthy. These insights shaped early design decisions and defined the overall direction of the project.
Competitive Analysis
Understanding the Smart Home Landscape
Visual vs. technical identity
Google and Apple feel clean and functional but emotionally cold; Alexa feels chaotic; Home Assistant is overly technical; SmartThings mixes robustness with some complexity. Domus can stand out by combining clarity with warmth
Compatibility
Home Assistant leads in technical breadth, while Google and SmartThings offer strong general compatibility. Apple and Alexa remain more limited. Domus can differentiate itself as a coherent, cross-brand bridge.
Shared control
Only SmartThings provides basic profiles. HomeKit and Alexa lack meaningful granularity. Domus should strengthen this area.
Emotional aesthetics
No major platform combines color, emotional presence, and human warmth. This is a high-value differentiation point for Domus.
Ease of use
All platforms present usability issues—technical setup, cluttered navigation, or confusing flows. A clear, friendly UX would be a major competitive advantage for Domus.
Research Insights
Fragmented ecosystem
Fear of making mistakes
Ununified languages
Unnecessary complexity
Emotional disconnect
Fragmented home view
Varied tech proficiency
Opaque automations
User Personas
Three archetypes emerged from the research, representing different ways of living and managing a connected home.
Points of View
1
The connected home is fragmented. Users juggle different apps and logics for similar tasks, making it hard to see and manage the home as a whole.
2
Technical complexity creates insecurity. People worry about breaking something or losing settings. They need an experience that feels lighter and more trustworthy.
3
Current interfaces lack warmth. Most platforms feel cold or impersonal. Users want something friendlier, more expressive, and human.
4
Real households need systems that support diverse users. Families, kids, seniors, and guests all require clear roles and permissions — a need current platforms don’t meet well.
How Might We
From these perspectives emerged four guiding questions that shaped the core direction of Domus and opened the path toward a clearer, warmer, and more intuitive smart-home experience.
1
How might we unify a fragmented smart home into a clear and coherent experience?
2
How might we reduce technical complexity and increase user confidence when interacting with smart devices?
3
How might we design an experience that feels warmer, more expressive, and emotionally accessible?
4
How might we support the real diversity of users within a single household?
From these questions emerged the project’s direction: to design a connected-home experience that unifies, clarifies, and humanizes the relationship between people and their devices. Domus offers an alternative to today’s often technical, fragmented, and emotionally neutral solutions, providing a unified experience where information is clear, actions feel trustworthy, and interaction becomes simple and friendly.
Its design combines advanced compatibility, layered navigation, and a vibrant visual language, allowing users of all ages to understand their home at a glance and interact without fear of breaking anything. Built for real households—with children, adults, seniors, or guests—Domus includes roles and permissions that reduce friction and strengthen the sense of safety.
More than a smart-home app, Domus is a way of inhabiting technology at home: accessible, expressive, and attuned to the rhythms of everyday life.
Site Map
The Site Map presents the global architecture of Domus, organizing its main areas—Home, Rooms, Automations, Settings, and Profile—into a clear and easy-to-navigate structure.
Secondary and tertiary sections unfold progressively to avoid overload and maintain intuitive navigation, while independent flows such as Add Device or Manage Members appear as complete modules within the system.
Together, the map reflects an orderly and coherent ecosystem aligned with Domus’ central goal: making the connected home more understandable, accessible, and warm.
User Flow
The User Flow shows how people move through Domus: from opening the app to controlling devices, creating automations, or managing household members. Its purpose is to transform a typically technical environment into a clear and accessible experience.The flow illustrates the different paths a user may take—adding a new device, adjusting lighting or climate settings, setting up routines, or defining permissions—and how Domus keeps each step simple and predictable. Its layered structure and minimal decision points reduce complexity and help the smart home feel like a unified, coherent, and easy-to-manage system.
It also highlights how Domus reinforces user confidence: control panels provide immediate feedback, the automation history allows users to review and adjust past actions, and roles ensure appropriate use within the household. Together, these elements help people with varying levels of tech proficiency interact without fear of making mistakes. Overall, the User Flow demonstrates how Domus turns potentially complex operations into an intuitive journey, bringing clarity, warmth, and security to everyday life in the smart home.
Task Flow
The Task Flows outline how Domus handles its most important user actions in a clear and predictable way. Each flow represents a simple, structured path that reduces technical complexity and helps users complete everyday tasks effortlessly.
The four main Task Flows are:
Add a New Device: quickly connect a new device through a guided setup.
Create a New Automation: build routines through clear, step-by-step configuration.
Manage Household Members: add profiles, roles, and permissions in a secure, organized way.
Control a Device: adjust lighting and climate with direct controls and immediate feedback.
Wireframes
Branding
Domus’ visual identity transforms home technology into a warm, expressive, and accessible language. Rather than adopting the cold, technical aesthetic typical of the smart-home sector, Domus embraces a colorful, human, and optimistic look that reflects real life inside a home.
The logo combines soft geometry with a symbol that subtly suggests a house seen from within, embodying the core promise of the product: control without complexity. Its curves and counterforms express movement, openness, and a human touch, reinforcing the idea that technology should adapt to people—not the other way around.
The color palette is built around saturated, luminous hues—lavender, saffron, Persian rose, mint green, banana yellow, and orange—that bring energy, clarity, and a contemporary domestic tone. These colors help users identify categories at a glance and create a visual system that is recognizable, friendly, and full of life. Neutral tones balance the palette and ensure clarity and legibility across all contexts.
Illustrations and icons follow a playful neobrutalist language, with bold outlines, minimal shading, and modular compositions. This style not only makes information more intuitive but also introduces humor, personality, and the sense of a “lived-in home,” avoiding the coldness often associated with tech products.
The Calibre typeface completes the identity with a voice that is clear, direct, and modern. Its softened geometric structure provides a clean yet approachable editorial presence, supporting both functional instructions and more emotional moments within the interface.
Together, these elements turn Domus into a smart-home experience that feels understandable, joyful, and human. More than organizing information, the visual identity builds a personality that invites users to engage with technology confidently and with warmth.
UI Design & Components
Prototype
In this phase, the design takes its final shape. Visual decisions, the color system, and the energy of the branding evolve into complete screens, interactions, and flows that show how Domus comes to life in everyday use.
Every transition, microinteraction, and system state is crafted to make home control clear, expressive, and predictable, while ensuring a fluid and accessible experience throughout.
Hi-Fi Overview
Hi-Fi in Motion
A walkthrough of the first Domus experience: from onboarding to the Home, discovering the home structure and accessing the app clearly and without friction.
Adding a new device and controlling it in real time: detection, basic setup, and immediate adjustment from the Home and its control panel.
Creating an automation step by step: choosing a trigger, defining the moment, and setting actions that coordinate multiple home devices.
A tour through home management: user profiles, roles, permissions, and settings that ensure safe and shared use.
Outcome & Results
Project Conclusion
Domus proposes a clearer, warmer, and more trustworthy way to interact with the connected home. The project demonstrates that home automation does not need to feel cold, complex, or intimidating: it can be expressive, understandable, and adapted to real everyday life.
From a product perspective, Domus addresses a core issue of today’s smart-home ecosystem—fragmentation, technical overload, and lack of user confidence—by introducing a unified visual and functional system that reduces friction and simplifies daily home control.
Expected Benefits
Human / user experience value
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3
4
Product / market value
1
Clear differentiation from technical or emotionally neutral platforms.
2
Higher adoption in real households, beyond tech-savvy users.
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4
Hypothetical KPIs
(proxy metrics)
If Domus were a real product, its impact could be measured through metrics such as:
Ease of adding new devices without drop-off.
Adoption of automations by non-technical users.
Use of history as a confidence and control mechanism.
Number of households actively using profiles and permissions.
Frequency of manual adjustments from Home or Rooms.
How well the product integrates into daily domestic routines.
Learnings
Domus allowed me to deepen my understanding of designing complex systems for everyday life, where clarity is not achieved by reducing functionality, but by structuring it in a way that feels understandable and predictable. Designing for a connected home means thinking in terms of flows, states, and relationships between elements rather than isolated screens.
1
One of the key learnings was understanding how user trust is built through small design decisions: immediate feedback, reversible actions, visible histories, and clear hierarchies help reduce the fear of “breaking something,” especially in shared technological environments.
2
The project also reinforced the importance of approaching the experience through a realistic multi-user perspective. Roles, permissions, and levels of control are not secondary features, but structural components when designing for households, families, and shared devices.
3
Finally, Domus confirmed that visual expressiveness can coexist with robust systems. A strong graphic language does more than convey personality: it acts as an orientation tool, helping technology feel more approachable, legible, and human.