The context
i-Homotic is a Colombian home automation company with a solid technical offer: locally manufactured hardware and software, no monthly fees, and voice assistant integration. Their problem wasn’t the product but the visibility: customers arrived only through word of mouth, and when someone interested asked to “see the website” before talking, they found nothing and ruled the company out before starting.
This was our final semester project in Interactive Design (EAFIT): a team of 6 people, a real client, and success criteria defined by the founder himself. My role combined user research, the design of the site’s interactive experiences, and much of the team coordination.
The key design decision
We said it from the project’s rationale onward: the challenge wasn’t technological, it was communicative. The 15 research interviews defined the target user: the “Informed Explorer”, a homeowner aged 30 to 55 who validates suppliers digitally before hiring them. And they revealed a decisive pattern: people don’t believe in home automation because of what they are told, but because of what they can try; and they adopt it by gradual expansion, starting small.
That’s why the site doesn’t inform: it lets you experiment. That’s where the interactive elements I designed came in: a budget and energy savings calculator that lowers the perceived financial risk before the first contact, and an explorable 3D map of an automated home, built with Three.js, where the user walks through the spaces, sees which devices each one would have, and moves straight from there to contact with an “I want this in my home”.
What we delivered
The project delivered a complete communication ecosystem:
- Website with six views, bilingual ES/EN, with the interactive experiences integrated and live in production
- Stand proposal for the Plaza Mayor Design Fair: 7×7 meters, a route through stations with real devices to handle, plus the technical implementation document and a scale 3D model navigable on the web
- Brand manual of 18 pages as the single source of identity for every channel
Beyond the interactive experiences, I took part in the research interviews, integrated the stand’s 3D model into the site, designed social media mockups following the brand manual and iterated on the stand model (the final model was made by a teammate).
The validation
We ran 39 sessions with 17 participants: a task-based cognitive walkthrough of the site and a Likert scale for the three deliverables. The results drove concrete corrections, and they also produced uncomfortable findings that we reported as they were: the task of “figuring out which solution to start with on a small budget” was the bottleneck of the journey, and the brand manual’s documentation of incorrect uses scored 2.4/5. Both became prioritized improvements.
The outcome
The success criteria defined by the founder were met: the site passed the digital validation filter with all 16 participants in the target profile, and the company was left with formal presentation material ready: a live site, a brand manual and a 3D model of the stand.
On the Likert scale, the three deliverables exceeded the 4.0 threshold:
- 4.8 for the willingness to schedule a visit
- 4.6 for pedagogical clarity, without jargon
- 4.6 for how useful the interactive experiences were for picturing the solution in one’s own home
- 5.0 for the stand, both for sparking curiosity about the brand and for communicating that home automation is accessible, not just for luxury houses
“It looks really nice, it looks professional. I loved the map.” — Validation participant
What I learned
Working with a real client who defined their own success criteria changed how I understand design. At university, success is defined by a rubric; here it was defined by the founder, with concrete goals: pass the digital validation filter, end up with formal presentation material. That forced me to design toward a verifiable north: every decision had to answer “does this bring us closer to the criterion?” and not “does this look good?”.
I learned that a client’s criteria don’t limit creativity: they focus it. And that reporting compliance against those criteria transparently, including what fell outside the scope and what scored badly, builds more trust than pretending the delivery was perfect.
