A wall-mounted tablet interface for whole-home control across multiple ecosystems.
I have a lot of smart home devices across multiple ecosystems. Hue bulbs in every room, smart locks, a Nest thermostat, motorized blinds, Sonos speakers, an automated air quality sensor hooked into a ventilation system, and a few Echos scattered around. The problem is none of it works well together. Even platforms designed to be unified smart home hubs are built too generally to handle this kind of setup well. Everything ends up too buried. Too many taps. Too separate. I tried an Echo Hub hoping it could serve as a central control point, but it had all the same problems.
So I built a bespoke dashboard for a wall-mounted tablet in the living room. A single interface designed specifically for our home.
The core design challenge was hierarchy. There are dozens of controllable objects across multiple rooms and ecosystems, and the interface needs to serve everyone from guests who just want to turn on the lights to me adjusting individual devices by room. The solution was a tiered approach to progressive disclosure.
Explore the dashboard above. Toggle between day, night, and ambient modes.
The first tier is a generalized home dashboard. Quick access to common scenes for the whole first floor, room-level toggles and dimmers, a unified blind control widget, and a media bar that stays minimal when nothing is playing but expands with controls when something is. It's what you'd use 80% of the time.
The second tier is room-level control. A drawer lets you select a room, and each room has its own dashboard with top-level controls, selectable object cards for individual devices, and a contextual panel that shifts from universal controls to fine-grained settings for whatever you've selected. Pick the whole room and you get room-wide dimming and color. Pick a single lamp and the panel becomes about that lamp.
The third tier is a floorplan view. Each floor rendered as a map with device icons placed in their actual locations. Tap to control, multi-select to group. It's the power-user view for when you want full spatial awareness and granular control.
A persistent tab bar ties it all together: home, rooms, automations, and floorplan. The automations page is deliberately simple, just a grouped list of existing automations you can toggle on or off.
Because this sits on a wall in our living room, the visual design had to belong there. The room has a mid-century feel with specific colors and materials, and I didn't want the dashboard to look like a piece of tech that got bolted to the wall. I designed the interface to blend in, matching the warmth and palette of the room so it fades into the background when you're not using it. It also swaps between a light and dark mode based on time of day and the current lighting in the room, so it never clashes with the ambient mood of the space.
The whole thing also has an ambient mode. When nobody's actively using it, the tablet cycles between a digital photo frame with a clock and a weather and calendar widget view, so the screen earns its place on the wall even when you're not touching it.