The brief

HomeIQ is a concept design for a smart home control app with an ambient, minimalist interface. AI learns the household's routines and surfaces gentle suggestions: turn off the unused lights, pre-warm the thermostat before everyone wakes up, lock the doors at the usual time. We built the brand and the iOS/Android concept across twelve weeks of internal exploration.

What we solved

Smart home apps tend to be feature dumps. Every device, every setting, every routine, all available immediately, all the time. The result is a wall of toggles. We wanted to design an app that hid the complexity behind ambient intelligence: do less for the user upfront, learn what they actually want, and surface only what's relevant in the moment.

How we got there

We anchored the design around three home-screen surfaces that adapt over time: now (what's happening right now), suggestions (what HomeIQ thinks the user might want), and rooms (manual control if needed). The brand uses warm grays and a single soft-green accent, leaning into the 'calm tech' aesthetic that's the opposite of every smart-home app's neon-blue dashboard. Claude powers the routine-learning and natural-language voice control.

What we shipped

The HomeIQ concept landed on a deliberately quiet home screen with three primary affordances and an ambient suggestion strip at the bottom. Manual device control is available but secondary. The voice control surface is treated like a conversation with a calm, capable assistant rather than a command-line. The brand system covers logo, color, type, and a small set of motion principles for the ambient surfaces.

What changed for the client

HomeIQ landed on Product Hunt's featured page when published as an internal concept and ended up on the Apple Design Awards shortlist. The work generated multiple inbound conversations with connected-home brands and helped position AXI as a serious option for the category.