House Designer 4+

I find this app too difficult to use. There appears to be no tutorial. I don’t find it user friendly. There is a lot of trial and error. During my trial and error I’ve made mistakes but can’t seem to undo?? I wanted something quick and easy, but this is NOT quick and NOT easy. In addition my negative review was blocked so I had to increase the star rating to get it published.

The controls are esoteric and unintuitive. It’s difficult to select doors properly, and moving one causes a giant hole to appear where it once was. I couldn’t figure out how to unselect items, or how to delete rooms properly. Selecting a room and pressing delete, only deletes half of it somehow?

The docks on either side take up nearly half of the screen which is ridiculous, even if you can hide them. The layout should be designed in a way where you can see what you’re doing without having to minimise anything. The 3d view is stagnant and serves no purpose, I couldn’t seem to rotate the camera, or pan the view in any way.

There should be some context clues, or a tutorial of sorts to use this app

I can draw some house plans, but gosh it’s fiddly to use.

I can import an aerial map or survey, but can’t rotate it, so can’t align walls to X,Y axes easily, so hard to get snapping to work well.

Drawing walls kind of connect to make rooms. Sometimes. Mostly not. Then when you zoom in and fix it, it manages to create so many extra edges, vertices, poor joins, unintentional shapes. Sometimes you drag something and it’s a dimension, rather than the wall. Sometimes you drag a wall and it changes thickness. Then all your new walls are a random new thickness.

When you zoom too far in, it jumps across the map to somewhere else. And if you try to pan or zoom while on wall drawing mode, well now you have a new wall across your plan. It’s pretty bad at detecting two-finger gestures.

I’m not sure if there’s anything better… but has taken me an hour or more to draw a simple plan from my head. I’d have just used grid paper or Notes app if I didn’t need to measure things and move walls around.