Dominique Müller created this concept as part of a university project. Our task was to prepare a presentation about a topic of our choice, and explain its consequences and specific requirements for interactive systems. They decided to give a talk about smart home. Smart home is an interesting area that opens up lots of new possibilities for all of us. But it also requires new ways of thinking about the interaction between humans and computers. He thought it would make much sense to also provide his classmates with a practical example of what a smart home application could look like. So he designed and presented this concept.

I’ve always wondered why smart home isn’t quiet here yet. In my opinion the biggest issue is that there are a lots of products out there you can start using today - but they all have their own protocols and apps. In order to control and monitor your home, you would have to work with dozens of different apps that can’t even communicate with each other. Additionally, I often read about how difficult and complex it is to set up your smart home. You only have one home - so in my opinion you should only need one app to control it. My idea was to have one central app which can bundle all smart home functionalities into one piece of software. The idea is similar to HomeKit from Apple, but goes one step further.
-Dominique Müller

Priority number one (and also the biggest challenge) was structuring the massive amount of data and finding a way to show them in a UI without users getting lost. I tried really hard to keep the navigation hierarchy as flat as possible while showing the most important information at the top levels. Well known Material Design patterns (like the navigation drawer, tabs or notifications) in combination with lots of images and icons should allow users to quickly navigate through the app. But pressing a physical button on a device itself often is just faster and easier than doing the same with a mobile app. Therefore, I added a Conversational User Interface in the form of a bot users can write and speak with. This way, users do not only interact with their home - they communicate with it in a more natural and intuitive way.
-Dominique Müller

Always remember: You design for your users. Because … well … he is the one that uses your app in the end. So I should make clear that this app concept was not created to replace physical buttons. Not at all. Smart homes should allow users to extend these physical interactions with automation and intelligence. Interacting with your smart home in the end should be a combination of physical buttons, touch screens, speech recognition and even gestures - whatever might be the fastest way in a specific situation.
-Dominique Müller

As probably every designer would say - I try to keep my designs simple, clean and consistent. But generally speaking, whenever I created UI designs I always tried to make them look and feel realistic. Probably because I also do a lot of web development. I would say that most of my designs are built-in a way so that they could be used and implemented in the real world.
Inspiration is everywhere - you can find lots of great designs on Dribbble and Behance. But I also love to look closer at applications I often use, like Twitter or After Effects, and try to figure out what they did good and what they could have done better.
-Dominique Müller

Just do it. If you have an idea, write it down, discuss it with other people, create wireframes and mockups. Then share them with people on the internet. It doesn’t matter if you are good or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s finished or not. Every designer started at some point, and nobody of them just got it right the first time - me neither, I mean this is my second design project and it’s far from perfect. But you can only get better when you do exercises, publish them in some way and then (and that’s the important part) learn from the feedback you get.
-Dominique Müller

About Dominique Müller

Dominique Müller is 21-year-old artist currently studying “Applied Computer Science” in his last semester here in Stuttgart, Germany. He's really passionate about UI & UX as well as development for the web. One day he want to be able to combine both of these skills to create well-crafted products that users not only need to use but want to use. All his design work can be found on his Behance profile or his website.