Homey

This one still makes me smile.

Back in 2018, Homey, a smart home device, brought me in to redesign their mobile app. Not a refresh, not a facelift. A complete redesign from scratch.

The Homey app is the control center for your entire smart home. And a smart home can be anything. Lights with full color pickers. Thermostats. Media players. Security cameras. Motion sensors. Door locks. The app needed to handle all of it, across dozens of device types, each with their own controls and states, while still feeling coherent and intuitive. The kind of app where you can walk in, hand it to someone who has never seen it before, and they immediately know what to do.

It also had to look the part. The new design would end up on retail packaging, so it needed to do more than just work well. It had to make someone pick up the box in a store and think: I want that.

After sharing the first screenshots, the client got so excited they posted a sneak peek on their blog before we were even close to done. User reactions exploded. People loved what they saw. Which was great, except we weren't ready to ship yet.

Months passed. Close to half a year later, the app finally went live in the App Store. The physical Homey device hadn't changed at all. Same hardware, same box. Only the app was new.

Homey has a gong in their office that rings with every sale. On launch day, it barely stopped ringing.

Over €150,000 in sales. In a single day. From a redesigned app.

That's the thing about design. When it's right, people feel it before they can explain it. And sometimes it rings a gong.