Designing the app that turns a wall display into a living art device.

Problem

One app had to hold art appreciation, device control, and buying without feeling like three separate tools.

Framed* users manage a physical display, browse and follow art, and can purchase work. Each task carries a different expectation: setup should be direct, discovery should feel inviting, and sending art to the wall should feel effortless. The design job was to make a device, a social feed, and a store read as a single product.

Constraints

• The display was limited to Wi-Fi connectivity, so pairing had to be reliable and reassuring without a physical tether.
• An art-forward brand had to coexist with utilitarian setup, brightness, and scheduling controls.
• A small team meant practical iteration rather than a formal research or analytics program.
• As the only designer, I owned both the product UI and the Framed* visual brand across app and website.

My Role

I was the first and only designer at Framed*, splitting my time between UI design and visual design for the brand. I owned the app end to end, from information architecture and flows to high-fidelity screens, and iterated with the team on sharing, device management, and art discovery.

Process

I mapped the whole product as one flow before designing screens.

Structuring explore, device, and user paths together surfaced the hard parts early: pairing a Wi-Fi device, deciding when a feed is public or private, and making "send to device" reachable from anywhere a user meets art.

Device Control

Turning a wall device into something you control from your hand.

Pairing had to work with no camera and no Bluetooth, only a Wi-Fi connection. I specced the device screen and the app screen as two parallel tracks, so every step in the app had a matching state on the wall. Step through the sequence below, and the branches where it fails.

Pairing Walkthrough

1. Searching for the device
2. Device found, verify it
3. Connecting, both screens agree
4. Connected
5. Hand over your Wi-Fi
6. Wi-Fi connected
7. Art on the wall

Failure Branches

Wi-Fi off Device off Device not found

Once paired, the app acts as the display's remote: a live preview of what is playing, and a control panel for brightness, scheduling, and settings. I kept the artwork front and center and pushed the utilitarian controls into a calm, secondary layer.

Feed and Discovery

Discover art, build a feed, and send it to the wall in a couple of taps.

The Feed lets people discover and share media from across the web, follow like-minded users, and curate collections. From almost anywhere in the app, a piece can be framed and sent straight to the device, so the distance between finding art and living with it stays short.

Key Decisions

Outcome

The shipped product brought the app, website, device controls, and marketplace into one connected Framed* experience. Users could pair the display over Wi-Fi, discover art, and send it to the wall from the same app. The team did not use product analytics to measure this work, so I present it as shipped scope rather than a measured engagement result.

Reflection

Connected products need two kinds of clarity at once: what the user is doing on screen, and what that action changes in the physical world. Designing for both is what made Framed* feel like one product instead of an app bolted onto a device.