Abound
I helped design 2 new features of Abound and improved the design system.
Abound by Carrier is a B2B application that helps maintain safer, healthier, and sustainable buildings by aggregating sensor data and providing data visualizations and insights on air quality, energy performance, and green building standards.
Feature 1: Streamlining remote access to devices
Context
Expanding Abound to smaller businesses
Abound's features were focused on companies with a large portfolio of buildings. By opening the platform to light commercial buildings and small businesses, we could reach 20-30k new users to help them maintain energy performance and building health.
Problem
How can we streamline remote management of devices for light commercial buildings and provide key insights on their performance?
Specific Goals
Show actionable insights on device performance and how they relate to different building spaces.
Show alerts from devices when key metrics are affecting the build's WELL (health and safety) score.
Allow management of device backups and access by technicians.
Who are we designing for?
I worked with the team's product manager and product designers to understand the user groups we are designing for.
Design Exploration
For research wireframes, I used components I created for the design system. The fidelity was lowered so users feel comfortable giving feedback.
I continuously iterated on how to best represent information that was most important to the users.
One consideration was how small details can lead to more user confidence for consequential actions like setting schedules for backing up data or restoring a backup version. After getting feedback from the design team, I opted to use a confirmation flow rather than a quick dropdown.
Another decision was how to provide relevant statuses on the graph in a concise and legible way. Several versions were created to help the team decide which includes the information that is most important for users. The first option was chosen for clarity and better color accessibility.
Solution
The solution included:
A dashboard that provides key insights on device performance.
Detailed device overview and performance page with customizable filters.
Design specifications for the developers annotate the parts, interaction flows, and variations depending on the data coming in from the sensors.
Feature 2: Helping building managers detect and resolve faulty equipment
Problem
How can we help building managers diagnose and solve faulty equipment?
Specific Goals
Show the specific fault, confidence level that it is faulty, and potential impact.
Provide context that shows what led to the fault and specific details to assess the situation.
Guide users on recommended solutions to address the fault.
Research
After reading through research reports and workshops in Figjam, I summarized the research team's findings and brainstorming sessions in terms of the problem, context, and possible solutions flows. This uncovered key design recommendations for building the solution.
Key Design Recommendations
Focus on quantifiable impact on budget and risk of further equipment failure so facility Managers can prioritize urgent issues.
Show problems in context with visible evidence (for example, graphs of equipment data should show where anomalies are and the building spaces they're tied to).
Guide users on recommended solutions to address the fault and provide confidence using evidence from previous solutions.
Wireframing
I built out several of the requirements originally in wireframes. However, those made too many assumptions about what users (facilities managers) needed and prioritized. So I broke up the sections into cards that could be dragged around for research.
Solution
The different sections were then organized based on priority of important information to create a flow that facility managers go through to diagnose the issue.
"This work feels like we actually understand our user. The way the design team took the work and organized all of the elements, creating a flow, its like a huge sense of relief to see something that seems to make so much sense for our users."
— Lead of Abound's design research team
Takeaways
Navigating complexity through design
The team worked with complex systems of equipment, devices, and large datasets. We often had to design with ambiguous, shifting information. I learned that while it's important to get solid data and requirements to work from, it was the process of designing - making something tangible and showing to others - that got questions answered.