February 2020 - May 2020
Web Application
Senior Product Designer
The Honeywell Forge building software initially lacked integration capabilities with users' existing third-party work order systems, which are crucial for accurately understanding the health and status of their facilities.
My goal was to design a user experience that was simple enough for our users to easily and effectively create API connectors that would stream their third-party data into our system.
The primary users of the API integrations framework are highly skilled Development Global Administrators and third-party companies hired by Honeywell Forge subscribers. Providing an easy API integrations interface helps these users go through the process of adding and updating integrations so Forge systems can start to deliver data and facilitate connectivity.
Artifacts: Multiple discovery-and-define stage research, conceptual, and visual models
At AWS, we adopt a design delivery method that integrates crucial phases: Discovery, Concept, Detail, and Deploy—for all our projects.
At Honeywell, our design process leverages a research approach for generative research and understanding and solving the problem at hand before we can create any user interfaces. Before I can begin designing, I need to better understand the user's perspective leveraging two targeted research deliverables: stakeholder interviews and competitive analysis.
I created a working session where different team members would collaborate on ideas for the new API integrations feature. During these white boarding sessions, I would break down research findings and identify the specific items I could tackle for this MVP of work, allowing my team and me to align on specific flows that I could expand on through designs.
We conducted 3 stakeholder interviews, these interviews helped us understand our users and aided with defining our personas.
I worked with our research team to create a competitive analysis that would help us understand what our competitors were producing in the integration and energy optimization space. We analyzed the main functions driving this market as well as the pain points and opportunites for Honeywell to excel in the integration space.
Intensive research helped us determine what kind of experience this should be. What were the most informative use cases we needed to articulate and design toward? How would the experience be structured?
We concluded that multiple design version releases would best meet our engineering timelines while at the same time delivering a flexible, feedback-driven augmentation model. Thus, a first release “MVP0” would ship in early March, followed shortly thereafter by MVP1.
I created a service blueprint to help product, engineering, and sales understand the end-to-end journey of a user purchasing the new software to configuring new integrations and use of corresponding data. We focused mostly on the setup and integration process for MVP0. Still, we would connect with the sales team to guide them through the service blueprints to better inform them on how they could adjust their sales plans in the future.
I created task flows using the service blueprint as a guide. The task flows detailed each step that a specific persona would go through to create and configure an integration.
The creation of user journeys helped illustrate each persona’s lifecycle interacting with the Integration API Solution. I presented user journeys to the customer operations team to help them understand the customer experience and different touch points when using the Integration API Solution.
With extensive research completed and information architecture deliverables reviewed and validated, I was ready to begin developing UIs for the new Integration API Solution.
I began sketching ideas using the validated and reviewed task flows I created in the define phase. I enjoy the freedom hand sketching allows me to experiment with, testing different designs and quickly iterating on my ideas.
I developed multiple high-fidelity wireframe iterations to test against our design specifications, gather feedback, and incrementally lift the user experience.
Once my low-fidelity wireframes were reviewed and validated, my efforts quickly transitioned to creating the first artifacts for wider testing and iteration.
Initially we had planned to conduct validation testing with subscribing customers. However, due to recent unforeseen global circumstances, our testing shifted internally to different development departments within Honeywell. The research team and I created a validation testing script and tested users on how to configure the integration.
After our first testing session we were to identify useful feedback that we implemented in our next iteration of the design. We conducted another testing round with different internal developers and validated the updated designs that we used as our initial MVP0.
We achieved our design goals within the timeline and budget. Currently the MVP has been developed and is currently available to subscribing customers. We have begun planning the next phase of features and enhancements that we have documented from our research and testing.
Elevating User Experience to Meet Industry Standards
A UX Case Study on Innovative Solution Integration
