“He made an above and beyond effort to learn and understand our domain so that he could deliver a UX design that was intuitive, functional and beautiful.” - Rene, client testimonial

flagship product research & design

I was tasked with overhauling the flagship product of the leading industrial heating and cooling technology company in the US. This company had been burned by “agency work” before and was wary of hiring another team. I was brought onboard as a solo, multi-disciplined, embedded UX researcher and designer to learn everything I could about the industry, the facilities, the users, and the software support staff in order to completely replace their aging and unsupportable flagship software.

In under six months, I learned the industry, sketched and prototyped UX, tested again, and garnered stakeholder alignment to begin development.

Let’s see how we got there.

The problem

The client had two major products: a robust “Legacy” product that did everything under the HVAC sun, and a new product with a scalable and stable architecture, but lacked features and no one was using it. Neither was perfect, to say the least, and we knew we wanted to re-design and modernize some of the most robust features from Legacy product into the new architecture, creating something that facility managers could use to monitor enormous, college campus sized air conditioning systems. Important stuff!

Over the years, the platform has become overloaded and unsupportable. Whether on sales demos, or assisting a customer on a call or on-site, the constant errors were causing lots of frustration and unease. Many of these issues had become technical debt that couldn’t be fixed down the road, with many people learning live with work arounds. Not an ideal situation. It was time to take the plunge.

My research revolved around formal feedback sessions, supported by other information gathering. Design audits and documenting of both platforms allowed me to explicitly list out the differences in the products and map user journeys as they completed their tasks. I toured a modern cooling facility to understand how people engage with the software on-site, and this tour also let me experience the real life version of what our software represents.

Once the initial round of research and documentation was complete, a value mapping workshop helped prioritize what to work on by inviting representatives from various user groups to provide feedback on the usefulness of features. This didn’t dictate exactly how I moved forward, but rather provided a greater understanding of my proposed features.

Findings

Pain points:

• Legacy software is slow. Data might load incorrectly or not at all.

• ”The Flash!” Software would incorrectly flash alarms and bad data for a moment.

• Site navigation is cumbersome, unintuitive, or no longer relevant.

Feature requests

• Up to the minute facility overview (no time gaps)

• Supplemental dynamic data to help diagnose problems

• Minute by minute replay of every action taken by the facility

I started by documenting the bare bones of what the Legacy software displayed on screen and used the research to think about how it should fit into the new architecture, in a way that was both visually pleasing and intuitive.