InStay Smart TV
InStay is a smart hospitality ecosystem integrating IoT devices, Smart TV, and a remote-control system to enhance the guest experience and streamline property management. Designed for both tenants and owners, it offers intuitive control, energy efficiency, and secure device management within short-term rentals.
Guests face difficulty adjusting lighting and climate, finding essential information and are deeply hesitant to log into their personal streaming accounts. Owners deal with wasted energy, device misuse, and limited control over property resources. InStay needed a cohesive, user-friendly solution that works seamlessly across devices while maintaining security and brand identity.
Our solution unites the Smart TV, IoT devices, the remote controller and the owner's application into one connected ecosystem. The Smart TV serves as an intuitive hub, giving guests complete control over their apartment and their stay. It provides a secure portal for personal streaming, with data deletion at check-out to ensure total privacy.
I was half of the two-person design cluster (with Mert Guven) responsible for all the designs across the Smart TV UI and the owner's app. I built the UX testing protocols, extracted data-driven insights from the sessions, and used my international background to run the tests in multiple languages: in person with over 30 participants and online with over 100.
4 months
2025
Always present but invisible
The InStay Smart TV UI turns the television into the guest's central hub, unifying entertainment, property information, and smart‑home controls in a familiar environment. Guests can access streaming, local TV, Wi‑Fi password, tourist information, house rules, and control lighting, climate, locks, and more, directly from the TV.
InStay also functions as a central control hub for all smart devices in the home. This includes air conditioners, smart lights, and smart locks.
At each step of the design phase, we confronted our low-fidelity prototypes with user testing. Through iterative testing and feedback, we refined the interface, navigation structure, and visual hierarchy, gradually evolving from simple wireframes to a polished, high-fidelity design that meets both usability standards and aesthetic goals.
The ecosystem
The InStay App is the owner’s central hub for connected hospitality spaces: monitor in real time, control devices remotely, and tailor the Smart TV experience, all from a phone or tablet.
The remote
A single remote that connects, controls, and personalizes the in-room experience.
The InStay Remote is an ergonomic, all-in-one controller for hospitality spaces, letting guests easily manage lighting, temperature, and media from one device. Its minimal design, tested through multiple prototypes, ensures intuitive use and complements any interior with five subtle color options.
The research
We backed this ecosystem creation with user testing. Final results on our system showed a 90% success rate on the owner's app. For the Smart TV tests, compared to benchmarks done before, our system performed consistently 40% better on both error rate and task completion time, with an overall result of 87% success rate across 4 different languages.
Project conceived and realized with Mert Guven, Luciano Lettieri Michele, Simona Invitti and Sabrina Maida at Politecnico di Milano.