Nefit (a Bosch brand) commissioned VanBerlo with the design of their newest smart thermostat, the Nefit Easy. I was asked to design an intuitive user interface for the device that would go along in terms of look and feel with the stylish hardware that my colleagues were creating.

At the beginning of the project, the hardware design was still undefined. The only feature that had been agreed upon was a circular display. I began making explorations of how things could work and created a few interactive prototypes to do some guerrilla testing and facilitate communication of the concepts.

As the industrial design started to take shape, I continued exploring ideas and created more refined mock-ups that took into account the sleek look and feel that my colleagues were aiming for with the thermostat’s hardware design.

By making an inventory of the different use cases for the thermostat, I defined the different screen states and types of interactions that were to be expected from the UI.

The thermostat design was further refined by the Bosch team and a companion app was developed following the same look and feel that we had designed. The product was successfully introduced to the market in The Netherlands and Germany where it gathered good reviews from consumers, and it won several prestigious international design awards.

Here be monsters!