A Home app concept posted on Behance pulls off a difficult trick: combining power and flexibility with ease of use.
Apple has done its best to walk that line, devices appearing as simple on/off buttons while a long-press reveals more powerful controls. For lights, for example, you can tap a button to toggle it on or off, and long-press to control the brightness or color – as well as to do things like assigning it to a different room…
Chinese fine arts student Lu Yuhang has taken this to a new level with his smart home app concept. It’s not positioned specifically as a Home app concept, rather as a more generic one, but it’s clear that the aim is the same: a single place to control all of your smart home devices.
Key to it is a flexible grid that allows users to decide what content they want where.
Users get full control of the typeface and color for both text labels and buttons. And there is, of course, a dark mode.
There are photo-realistic representations of devices, and there’s a much easier way to move them between rooms, allowing you to do this with several devices at once.
Although this might be a rather infrequent need, one thing I found when configuring our smart home is that it was often useful to create virtual rooms for easier Siri control. For example, while our living room is a single room with a dining area, we have a separate ‘Living room’ and ‘Dining room’ for HomeKit purposes. Similarly, the wardrobes are a ‘room’ for lighting, as is the storage area beneath the platform bed.
You can assign different permissions to different family members – for example, limited permissions for children.
The whole Home app concept is worth checking out. Let us know what you think in the comments.
