Role:
Design Lead
Team:
2 Product Managers, 4 Engineers, and myself
Building Alert: 3 day design sprint
Building Alert is an IoT dashboard that gives building managers actionable insights into their buildings and devices. The dashboard allows managers to see their overall building performance as well as individual sites.
The Challenge
The product managers came to me with two main pain points they were hearing from customers:
Customers wanted to clearly visualize issues in their buildings so they could act on them immediately.
3 of our customers had different experiences but very similar use cases and we wanted to templatize this dashboard experience for them.
Project Goals
Improve the System Usability Scale score from 58 to at least 70
Improve the dashboard's aesthetics
Sprint Process
I only had three days to plan out the sprint because it was a busy time of the year for the team. I decided to consolidate the understand and sketch phases into Monday, make the big decisions and prototype on Tuesday, and leave Wednesday for testing.
Day 1
What’s on your radar?
Before the design sprint, I worked with our user reserach team on a persona based on user interviews we had conducted in the past. I presented the persona to the product team and hung it on the wall so we could keep our customer in our mind.
How might we
“How Might We” is a design framing exercise from the sprint methodology that takes the focus away from solutions and begins the dialogue for ideation. This was the most challenging activity in the sprint because the participants kept jumping to solutions and I had to keep refocusing their attention on asking questions.
“How might we create a dashboard where users can quickly address problems in their buildings? ”
“How might we create a proactive instead of reactive experience ”
After the team wrote down all their notes from the customer feedback and “How Might We” activity, we began to sort the trends we were seeing. The key concepts that stuck out were: Richer insights, Actionable interface, Cleaner aesthetic, and Details at every level.
Sketches
I only had three days to plan out the sprint because it was a busy time of the year for the team. I decided to consolidate the understand and sketch phases into Monday, make the big decisions and prototype on Tuesday, and leave Wednesday for testing.
Day 2
What will we build
To start off Tuesday, we picked apart everything we worked on from Monday and decided on what we will build. We put together guiding principles as well as features we wanted for the prototype.
Wireframes
After reviewing the team's sketches, our guiding principles, and the features we wanted to include, I came up with three different versions of the Building Alert dashboard.
We decided to choose option 2 for our dashboard redesign because it hit all of our guiding principles and the interactive blueprint feature was familiar for the building managers.
Day 3
It’s time to test
Earlier in the week, we gathered 6 of our customers that fit our building manager persona. I didn't have much time but I ran our customers through our designs and got some rough feedback.
After talking with users, there were some key areas that needed to be improved:
Blueprint view: Users wanted more info about their sensors
Quicklook view: Users wanted more details around the issues
Activity feed: Users wanted to know if an activity was positive or negative and what time it happened.
After this long retrospective, our sprint finally came to an end!
Next steps
After the sprint ended, I reflected on the learnings and feedback we gathered and started to flesh out a more detailed dashboard and detail view experience. After these were created, I spoke again with our customers to get their thoughts.
We received great feedback on almost all the components and I incorporated these thoughts to arrive at our to date designs.
Lessons Learned
What worked and what didn’t
From a design sprint perspective, the activity was invaluable for fostering creativity. It was amazing to get everyone in the same room and on the same page and I could immediately see people's gears turning in a different way.
Unfortunately, I felt like we didn't have enough time to fully achieve the task at hand. Squeezing a five-day activity into three days is brutal and we had to cut a lot of corners. Next time around I would stick to the five-day format.
Was it a success?
As far as our target goal, we improved the System Usability Scale score from 58 to 72 which took us from a below average or “Ok” score to above average and into the “Good” range. We realize that the previous score was a live dashboard and the post score was just a prototype but we thought it could act as “a finger to the wind”.
Next case study
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