The 7" wall-mounted touch device designed by 21AM for Vimar marks the beginning of the company’s true entry into the digital world. Conceived and developed with essential forms to extend and renew the range of what used to be called home automation supervisors, this product is in fact the testing ground for Vimar’s new smart home command and control system: View.
Before tackling the design of the graphical interface and visual language—meant to bring the control of home automation devices not only to wall-mounted displays but, for the first time, also to smartphones—Vimar asked 21AM to develop a new concept for the user experience and information architecture.
Through dedicated sessions with different corporate functions, interviews with technical sales staff and retailers, and extensive work on redefining logic and taxonomies, 21AM completely revolutionized and reorganized the guiding principle of the GUI, transforming a classic function-based mechanism into a user experience shaped around intentions. Within three new access points—“Manage”, “Explore”, and “Customize”—features are distributed independently of their technical nature and instead respond to simple questions such as “What type of object do you want to control?”, “Which room do you want to manage?”, “Which function do you want to customize?”
Once the new design paradigms were defined and agreed upon, View was translated into a GUI capable of adapting to different devices, both embedded and mobile, and into a rich visual language able to describe in minute detail the states of the various functionalities and the countless control possibilities.
The View project, which continues to evolve across different products and interfaces to this day, was not only a complex and ambitious undertaking but also the moment in which the entire company became aware of the existence—and therefore the logic—of digital product management. Moreover, 21AM’s ability to offer deep expertise in both hardware and interface development made it possible to manage in parallel two aspects of the product that, in the real user experience, are profoundly fused and interdependent.