What should a property app's home screen show you about a home?
A good home screen answers two questions at once: what does the home look like, and how far along are you with it. Everything else — buttons for the individual features — can wait for the next tap. Most apps mix it all together and show too much at once.
Short answer: the screen for a single home should show a glance of the whole — a drawing or model you recognise the home by — plus status: has it been scanned, how many rooms, what is the area. After that comes access to the individual features: floor plan, 3D, takeoff, budget. The order matters. If the feature buttons sit at the top and the whole-home view is at the bottom, you spend longer working out where you are, every single time you open a home.
Why a home's screen is a navigation problem, not a decoration problem
A home in a measuring app typically holds many layers of data: a floor plan, a 3D model, measurements per room, photos, a budget, maybe a checklist. None of that is the home screen — the home screen is the place you land every time you open the home again, and it has to orient you faster than you could read a menu. It's a navigation problem: how far along am I, and what do I want to move on to.
It's easy to get this wrong in both directions. A home screen with too little information forces you to click through just to see whether the home has even been scanned yet. A home screen with too much — every number, every button, every warning at once — becomes a list you have to read, instead of a picture you recognise instantly.
The visual anchor: something you can recognise in half a second
If you have five to ten homes open, you need to be able to see which is which without reading the address. An image of the floor plan or a render of the 3D model solves that better than a text list does — the brain recognises shapes faster than it reads words. That matters most when several of your homes look alike on paper: same number of rooms, same area, but a different layout. A visual anchor is what tells them apart in practice, not the numbers next to it.
The status figure: how far along the home is
The second thing a home screen should answer without a tap is how "finished" the home is. Has it only just been created but not yet scanned? Are all the rooms in, or is one missing? Without that answer visible, you have to open the home and hunt for it yourself — every single time. A single status figure or a short line of text ("3 of 4 rooms scanned") saves you that trip.
Area belongs here too, because it's the figure people most often compare homes on. But show only one area at a time on the home screen — if a home has several possible area figures (the register's, your own measured one), the home screen shouldn't force you to work out which one is showing. Save the difference for the screen where you actually calculate with the figure.
Feature access: second place, not first
Floor plan, 3D model, takeoff, budget — the individual features deserve a place on the home screen, but not at the top. They should be what you tap once you already know which home you're looking at and what you want to do. Put them at the top, and they compete for attention with the home's own image, and the screen loses its primary job: letting you know where you are in an instant.
A practical rule of thumb: anything that answers "which home is this" belongs at the top. Anything that answers "what do I want to do now" belongs below it.
How many features are too many on one home screen?
A home can in practice have half a dozen or more associated features: floor plan, 3D model, walkthrough, daylight study, takeoff, budget, window and door schedule, checklist. Lay them all out as equal buttons in one long list, and the home screen becomes a menu you have to read every time — and the most-used features drown among the rarely used ones. Group them instead by how often they're used — the two or three most-used as large, visible icons, the rest gathered under one "more" entry — and the screen becomes faster to read without any feature actually disappearing. It's the same trade-off a well-written restaurant menu makes: not everything can be printed in the same size type.
Should the home screen show one room at a time, or the whole home at once?
Most homes have between three and eight rooms, and a home screen that tries to show data for every single room alongside the home as a whole quickly gets cluttered. The better choice is for the home screen to show the home as a whole — one combined area, one drawing, one model — with the room-level detail one tap away, on a list or by tapping the room directly on the plan. That keeps the home screen clean while no information is actually hidden; it's just moved to the level where it belongs.
Features that shouldn't be shown before there is data to show them for
If a home has just been created and not yet scanned or drawn, there is no budget to open, no takeoff to export, no 3D model to rotate. Showing those buttons anyway — greyed out, or active with an empty screen behind them — creates confusion: the user taps and finds nothing. The clearest answer is to say so plainly: "scan the house first to unlock these features" is a better message than a dead button that doesn't respond.
This is a general principle for any app that builds on data you have to supply yourself first: show features as something waiting for you, not as something that already exists.
Day and evening — should the home screen change with the time of day?
Some apps let a 3D view on the home screen change appearance depending on whether the phone is in light or dark mode — a sunny card by day, a lit-up card by evening. That's a nice-to-have, not a necessity, but it makes the screen feel more alive while also signalling something true: that the home's light has actually been calculated, not just rendered as a fixed image. If the light in the view is genuinely calculated from the home's location and orientation, that kind of variation makes sense. If it's just a filter effect on a fixed image, it doesn't really add information — only mood.
What a home screen should never promise
However well a home screen is designed, it should never imply an accuracy the data doesn't have. Show an area with two decimal places, and it signals a precision a scan can rarely deliver on its own. Show a 3D model with a ceiling that looks measured but is actually estimated — because ceilings typically can't be scanned reliably — and it should say somewhere that the ceiling height is an estimate. The same goes for the doors' swing direction: it can't be read from a scan alone, and a home screen that shows the doors as if the direction were measured promises more than the app can deliver.
What HouseSense does
The house screen in HouseSense shows the drawing sheet first — a recognisable image of the home's plan — alongside a 3D mood card that switches between day and evening depending on whether the phone is in light or dark mode, calculated from the house's actual location and orientation, not a fixed filter. The feature icons for floor plan, 3D, takeoff and budget sit below that, and if a home hasn't been scanned yet, the app says so plainly instead of showing greyed-out buttons that lead nowhere.
What you should look for
- Can you tell which home it is without reading the address? An image of the drawing or model should sit at the top.
- Can you see the status without a tap? Scanned or not, how many rooms, one combined area.
- Do the feature buttons come after the whole-home view, not before it? They should support the overview, not compete with it.
- Do empty features disappear, or do they stay active without data? A message is better than a dead button.
- Does the home screen promise more accuracy than the data actually has? Estimated figures — like ceiling height — shouldn't look measured.