A calm renovation-coordination tool that turns scattered contractor schedules into one timeline — and warns you before a single delay cascades.
Most people coordinate renovations through scattered notes, messages and memory. One delayed delivery quietly pushes three other phases — and nobody sees it until a contractor shows up to a room that isn't ready. TAKT makes those dependencies visible, so timing becomes something you can read at a glance instead of hold in your head.
The user isn't a project manager. They're an investor or homeowner juggling people, dates and materials with no system underneath — so the mental load, not the work itself, is what overwhelms them.
Schedules live across messages, calls and memory — never in one place.
A single delay cascades silently into later phases and deliveries.
Dependencies between trades are invisible until something collides.
Existing tools are too heavy — built for construction pros, not people.
Rather than a feature-heavy management suite, TAKT does one thing well: it treats the renovation as a living timeline where every phase knows what it relies on. Reorder a block, and the system reacts.
TAKT never reorganises the plan for you. It surfaces conflicts, delays and dependency risks quietly, and leaves the decision in your hands — keeping the user in control of their own project.
Phases are draggable blocks on a spatial timeline. Rescheduling is the primary interaction — you grab a phase and move it in time, the way you'd think about stages physically, rather than editing a form.
Most renovations start from a predefined room — kitchen, bathroom, full apartment. But not everything fits a template, so a custom project lets you name your own scope and phases. Either way, phases stay sequential, so the dependency logic just works.
Risks appear as low-key contextual alerts, never alarms. A warm amber for caution, a soft red for a real conflict — enough to notice, never enough to stress.
A desktop-first workspace for planning, and a mobile companion for the day-to-day: today's phases, a quick status update, what needs attention. Same data, different moment.
The goal was never to manage the renovation — it was to reduce the uncertainty of living through one.
The working prototype models the core loop end to end: set up predefined rooms or a custom project, then drag any phase. TAKT immediately recalculates downstream impact, previews how dependent phases shift, and lets you decide — shift the schedule, or mark it as a conflict. Try moving a phase block below.
Scoping ruthlessly — no budgeting, no marketplace, no AI automation — kept the concept honest. The product earns its calm by doing less, and the dependency model is the one idea worth building everything else around.
Treating the timeline as a spatial object, drawing on an architectural way of thinking about phases and adjacencies, made the interaction feel intuitive without explanation.
The mobile companion deserves its own depth — the day-of-renovation moment is where calm matters most, and a glanceable "today" view could carry more weight.
I'd also test the alert language with real renovators: the line between reassuring and ignorable is narrow, and only field use would tell me where it sits.