Santa Fe Connect

Santa Fe Connect is the companion app for Santa Fe's whole-home dehumidifiers — the quiet system keeping basements and crawl spaces from turning into a mould problem. We rebuilt the mobile experience from a fifteen-year-old foundation, then paired it against real hardware shipped straight to the studio.

The app we inherited was older than the iPhone. Built roughly fifteen years earlier, for a different generation of phones and a much simpler idea of what a "connected" device could do, it buried basic controls under nested menus and left people guessing what half the icons meant. Meanwhile the hardware had moved on — Santa Fe's dehumidifiers had gained a proper Wi-Fi module. The app hadn't caught up to what the device could now actually do.

This wasn't a reskin. The brief was a full rebuild — new information architecture, new visual language, a real onboarding flow — while working with hardware we couldn't touch. Every screen we designed eventually had to survive contact with an actual dehumidifier, not just a prototype click-through.

• Rebuild the full mobile experience from scratch — research through high-fidelity UI — without changing the underlying hardware
• Design a Bluetooth-to-Wi-Fi setup flow simple enough to complete without opening the manual
• Give people one clear, glanceable way to monitor and control multiple units across the home — basement included
• Validate every flow against the real physical unit, not just a prototype

We started by taking the legacy app apart, screen by screen — less a redesign kickoff than an archaeology dig. Settings were nested three and four menus deep. Some toggles had no visible label at all. One screen's exact purpose we genuinely never solved.

Alongside the teardown, we looked at how other connected-home categories — thermostats, smart plugs, air quality monitors — handled the same basic relationship: a person, a phone, and a physical object trying to stay in sync. The pattern that kept showing up was a single home screen with the number that matters most front and centre, and everything else exactly one tap away.

Pictured, roughly: the face you make finding a settings screen with no visible way back except force-quitting the app.

Getting a new device online is the single most important five minutes in any IoT product. Nail it, and someone trusts the app for years. Fumble it, and they're calling support before they've used a single feature.

Santa Fe's dehumidifiers connect to Wi-Fi through a small Connect module, and the app's job during setup is to hand that module its Wi-Fi credentials over Bluetooth — find the device, confirm it's the right one, pass along the network password, name it, assign it to a room. After that handshake, the app talks to the device over the network rather than a Bluetooth link, so people can check their basement humidity from the office, or from another country, without standing next to the unit.

The dashboard became the new centre of gravity. Live relative humidity and temperature sit at the top, indoor and outdoor, with the two controls people actually reach for — target humidity and sleep mode — one tap away. A household running a unit in the basement and another in a crawl space manages both from the same screen, as separate cards, instead of hunting through a device list buried three menus deep like the old app made them do.

Sleep mode got its own bit of design attention: a simple one-to-four-hour timer for the moments someone just wants the unit quiet, without wading into a settings screen to remember to turn it back on.

Some notifications are nice to have. Others are the entire reason someone bought a connected dehumidifier in the first place. We treated the two very differently.

The alerts that mattered — relative humidity over 65% for more than 24 hours (a mould risk), water detected near the unit, a drain pan close to overflowing, or the device simply going offline — got their own clear, high-priority pattern, worded so a non-technical homeowner understood the stakes immediately. Everything else stayed quiet. The goal was an app people trusted enough to ignore most of the time, and would actually see the one time it mattered.

Partway through high-fidelity design, a large box showed up at the studio: an actual Santa Fe dehumidifier, shipped over so we could stop designing against assumptions and start designing against reality. We wired it up, paired it over Bluetooth, and ran the whole prototype against it end to end.

Reality, as usual, had opinions the diagrams didn't. Pairing that looked instant in a click-through took a few seconds and a bit of trial and error with a real Bluetooth radio and a phone held at an unnecessarily specific angle. We adjusted the connection-state screens, tightened the retry and error messaging, and made sure the app never left someone staring at a blank spinner with no idea what was happening.

The unboxing that turned a design review into an impromptu Bluetooth debugging session.