Honeywell Building Automation System
This case study explores my role and process designing Honeywell’s Command & Control Suite - easily one of the most interesting and innovative products I had the privilege of working on.
Background
Honeywell’s Command & Control Suite software is dedicated to empowering building operators to better service their facilities. It translates complex facility data into an easy to use interface so staff can make more informed decisions to safely prevent or respond to incidents and efficiently execute daily tasks.
The result is a safer and more comfortable environment for everyone.
My role
Being the only designer for this product, my role was broad and included UI design. I worked closely with the product owner and developers to optimise and deliver awesome features.
Achievements
Delivered new incident workflow management features so building operators can collaborate better
Ensured deliverables were customer focused by defining and embedding Experience Outcomes to drive sprint goals
Optimised UI to improve ergonomics in dark environments
Research & focus areas
I was lucky to have a wealth of foundational customer research available to me. The vision of the product was also crystal clear.
To ensure this foundation was still relevant, I connected with front-line staff regularly to obtain customer insights. I also made visits to building sites to observe and interview users.
Example problem areas
Users work in dark environments and have many screens to monitor - how might we help staff focus better and ensure they are alerted to incidents?
It takes a team to run facilities - how might we make collaboration between staff dispersed in various locations easier and ensure standard operating procedures are followed?
Example design thinking artefacts
Experience outcomes derived from research and used to inform our sprints
A snapshot of the environments they are working in to remind us of user contexts
Storyboards to visualise customer outcomes
Design & delivery
I worked with the product owner to understand our priorities for the next few sprints. I designed ahead of development sprints and we had daily catch-ups with the team to discuss progress.
Example designs
Map design with data overlays and progressive zoom
I designed a dark UI with considered iconography and colours combined with progressive disclosure interactions. This balanced alerting staff to emergencies with secondary facility data & functions. The outcome? Less noise and information overload, more focus.
Incident management workflow
I designed a new functionality to support incident workflow management: again, progressive disclosure was a key pillar for this. It enables staff to find relevant standard operating procedures, drill into these and provide comments in real-time. All actions were captured to allow for traceability and retrospective discussions.
Reflections
This was an amazing and high performing product team to work in. I was able to design innovative and thoughtful experiences, with talented developers who were able to push the existing infrastructure. One thing I’d improve is measuring success quantitatively and using these as an additional insight to inform delivery.