Designing a Devicebook Smart Home for your Client

Previous Article: Starting a new Smart Home Job

1. Collect Your Client's Requirements

You'll need to meet with your client, see their home, and gather the client's requirements for their smart home.

Your client may not know all the smart home features that you can offer using Devicebook. You should suggest to your client the cases in which the smart home features and solutions that your company supports would be useful to them.

You can learn about the features of each smart home solution here: See the "Using..." articles here.

At a minimum, you'll need to collect information on the smart home features your client wants in each room. You can take notes about a job in the "Job Notes" section of your job in Devicebook for Contractors.

While visiting the client's home, you'll likely want to note down other important design details such as the potential locations of devices, number of outlets and switch boxes in a room, objects and barriers that could impede wireless signal, and more. We highly recommend reading through this entire Smart Home Design Guide before your first smart home installation job.

2. Create a Design Proposal

A smart home design is a very important step in creating a smart home for your client. It details the exact features and devices in each room of a home. Devicebook will automatically generate your client's personalized smart home app, a Home Controller, based on your design. We'll go over that in the next article.

You can start a new smart home design in Devicebook for Contractors by pressing the Create a Design button in Job's page.

Devicebook will walk you through starting your design, asking for a name, description, and layout of the home. 

Devicebook will also ask you to select the smart home solutions that will be used in the smart home. You should select all smart home solutions that your client has requested. You'll be able to change all of this information later.

Once you've entered the basic information in the dialog, you'll see the Devicebook Smart Home Designer. This is your tool for designing any smart home, for any client.

The left side navigation bar is a step-by-step guide for designing the smart home. The right pane is an easy-to-use workspace that shows you details about the item you've selected on the left.

Hint: Watch this detailed video example about how to create a design.

Creating a smart home design is a simple process, but there's a lot you can do. We highly recommend reading through the Smart Home Design Guide for detailed information and help on designing a smart home. It provides assistance with device selection, accessories, network planning, and more.

3. Get Client Approval

Once your smart home design is ready, you should get approval from the client. You can send a quote to your client from the designer in "Step 4: Quote' by clicking the Send Quote button. It will send the quote as an email to the email address you entered as your client's contact information.

Communicate with your client to get their verbal approval on the design for the smart home. When the client approves the design, you can mark the design approved from the Job's detail page, by clicking the "Approve Design" button on the design:

When you've marked the design approved in Devicebook for Contractors, you're ready to generate the Home Controller.

Next Article: Generate Home Controller