Designing an AI renovation studio people can steer
Renovate AI Studio lets homeowners, real estate agents, and enterprise teams remodel a space from a photo. I led the redesign of the web studio, turning what the AI could do into a flow people could follow and control.
Company
Renovate AI
Role:
Senior Product Designer
Industry:
Home Renovation & Real Estate
Timeline
May – June 2024
Preview
People liked the ideas, not the controls
Interviews with homeowners, agents, and enterprise clients kept surfacing the same tension. People valued what the AI suggested, but they couldn’t tell what to do next, and they couldn’t adjust what it produced. I worked with a product manager, frontend and backend engineers, and an AI specialist to close that gap.
Put the canvas at the center
I built two directions far enough to test: a side navigation with stacked filters, and a free canvas with a central action bar. I recommended the canvas before testing because it matched our existing patterns and would scale, then let the sessions decide. The canvas held up. People kept their context, and could step back to an earlier stage without losing work.
An action bar that changes with the task
In testing, people pressed Next again and again without changing anything, believing they were making progress. A static toolbar was familiar but showed the same tools at every step. I chose a dynamic action bar that surfaces the tools for the current step, always in the same place. The tradeoff was a learning curve for first-time users, so it ships with tooltips at the key moments.
Bring engineering in at the wireframe
Engineering review of the first designs showed they would need a major refactor. We reworked the parts that caused it while keeping the core experience intact, but the lesson stuck: I now run feasibility reviews at the wireframe stage. The studio also started Renovate AI’s design system, which later became its own project.