Designing the Nook planner: one model, four workflows

Five years, one constant.

Nook grew out of a smart-home planning product called One Enabled. Homeowners mapped their rooms, picked compatible devices with guided help, and got a complete package at the end. I designed its interface while I was at James Ross Advertising in 2020.

One of the people behind that project saw a bigger opportunity: the same room-by-room model could help someone plan an entire renovation. When he founded Nook, he asked me to join as the first employee and the only designer.

Over five years, we pivoted between homeowners, designers, and retailers as we searched for product-market fit. The planner was the constant. Every shift in audience changed what it needed to support.

The founder acted as product manager, owned the data model, and led every customer conversation. I owned everything people saw: interaction design, UI, prototyping, the brand, the product asset library, and the design system that carried the experience into production.

I worked directly with as many as six frontend, backend, and 3D engineers.

One model, four workflows.

Homeowners think in goals, rooms, and pictures. Designers work spatially. Retailers need product specifications they can order from. Nook had to serve all three without splitting into three disconnected products. Our central bet was that a renovation should exist once, as a single shared project file between homeowners, designers, and retailers. Everyone would meet through the workflow relevant to them.

We made guided scope builders to help homeowners turn renovation ideas into decisions about rooms, products, and scope.

In the planner, designers and building professionals could edit a homeowner’s submitted plan or start their own, freely placing and adjusting items. The 3D render gave everyone involved a realistic preview of those decisions.

The product output collected placed products and their configurations into a structured table for retailers and builders. Users could share the whole project or export its product data.

The same model handled distribution. A retailer could embed Nook on its own website and open it preconfigured for a category. A flooring customer landed in a flooring experience, but the system underneath did not change.

Show the next decision, not the whole catalog.

The planner used a familiar layout: asset browser on the left, canvas in the middle, properties on the right. The harder problem was helping someone find a product in a deep catalog.

The first browser showed each level of the catalog as another row of tabs. Selecting a category revealed its subcategories below, then another row beneath those. The hierarchy was visible, but every step added more navigation to the screen.

In the founder’s click-through sessions, participants kept getting lost in those levels. He relayed the findings to me, and I reframed the problem: the browser needed to help someone make their next choice without asking them to understand the entire catalog.

I redesigned it to show one level at a time. Each selection opened the next set of choices, while breadcrumbs kept the path visible and gave people a way back.

The new design added steps, but each step presented fewer choices. Breadcrumbs kept the path visible without keeping every navigation level open.

Decide what to draw, what to compose, and what to constrain.

A kitchen design is a stack of independent decisions: layout, placements, materials, finishes, and best practices. One base-cabinet family alone combined ten configurations, three construction types, three color modes, and two perspectives. That is 180 unique drawings before door styles, finishes, or size enter the picture.

Giving every item combination its own drawing would have made the library impossible to maintain. I had to decide which differences needed dedicated drawings, which could use shared parts and properties, and which should be handled through rules.

Draw the geometric differences

Configurations and construction types received dedicated drawings wherever the geometry changed. Those drawings formed the base that other choices could build on.

Compose the finish choices.

I designed eleven door styles that applied across cabinetry and panel-ready appliances. Materials and finishes stayed selectable properties, so changing the appearance of a product did not require another complete asset.

That let the same styling decisions carry across a kitchen. A cabinet and a dishwasher could share a door style even though the products underneath were different.

Constrain size and behavior

I specified how cabinet widths should resize within defined limits, instead of requiring a drawing for every measurement. I also defined placement, snapping, and clearance rules across six kitchen layouts.

Across the kitchen library, I designed about 2,400 individual drawings. Reserving drawings for geometric differences—and handling other variations through shared styles, properties, and rules—let that library support many more finished product combinations.

From planning to a retailer handoff.

Nook launched as an embedded lead-generation experience with Don Bailey Flooring and Marshall Flooring. Each retailer could offer a flooring guide on its own website, with the category already selected.

The shared project connected the homeowner’s selections to structured product information for the retailer. That handoff was the business purpose behind the planner: helping a customer describe a renovation in enough detail for someone else to take the next step.

What I would carry forward.

Nook ran out of runway in 2026 and had to let the team go. The founder is still pursuing the idea, and I continue to work with him on a contract basis. The planner remains available at nook-pro.com.

I would change how I participated in research. The founder led customer conversations and passed the findings on to me. That feedback informed decisions like the browser redesign, but I rarely observed sessions or reviewed the original notes. In a future team, I would establish shared observation and access to raw feedback from the start, so I could ask follow-up questions and test my interpretations.

I would carry forward the habit of designing across the whole product. A cabinet’s door style, dimensions, and placement had implications for the plan, the render, and the product information handed to a retailer. Working through those connections shaped how I approach complex products: understand what a decision affects, then design how it carries through.