Commercial HVAC systems are extreme contributors to climate change, and a major tax on the energy grid. Turntide aimed to address that problem with a full-enterprise system to help customers understand their energy spend, spot problem areas and perform predictive maintenance through machine learning
In 2022, they acquired Riptide Software out of Santa Barbara, a versatile yet dated software that was struggling to make its mark on the industry.
My team's mission was to both modernize the interface and bring it into alignment with the actual needs of the users. Without product/market fit, however, there was considerable disagreement about who the users even were.
Enterprise-first questions gave the users topsight through data rollups while enabling them to explore for greater insight.
Getting together onsite gave the team a better ability to see eye-to-eye on difficult issues and agree on a shared vision.
In order to get the most from our system, we had to get back to basics and separate the user from the customer. Who pays for the product versus who uses it every day?
It takes a lot of different personas to get a commercial HVAC system installed in large buildings--from the mechanical contractor constructing the system to the maintenance personnel who will interact with it every day. And what about the occupants, who would have to live with the decisions we made?
The team traveled to Santa Barbara, where I led a workshop to radically reimagine our user base. It was here that we discovered that our user wasn't the building owner or even the specifier.
Our real users were the HVAC manufacturers who were supporting whole fleets of customers without any reliable remote intelligence.
Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) were rolling trucks and sending technicians to jobs every day, resulting in worse service and higher costs. Our system enabled them to eliminate those truck rolls along with providing suggestions for predictive maintenance.
The resultant system was sold to Brainbox AI, where it remains a valuable resource.
"What sets Alex apart is the combination of strategic thinking, user-centric approach, and ability to collaborate effectively across teams. Deep understanding of both design principles and customer needs makes Alex an asset to any organization."
-Mario Montag, Turntide General Manager
Reimagined interfaces enabled users to quickly perform batch tasks and focus on more important issues.
The Terminus system simplified the process of node setup from 2 weeks of calls back and forth to less than 8 hours of work.
Historically, CodeMettle was a government services company, setting up difficult network infrastructure in-theater. With their groundbreaking Terminus product, they wanted to create a turnkey system for field deployments.
The user mission: enable low-to-no training personnel to set up complex satellite networks in the most hostile environments.
But there was a second major aspect--the corporate mission: go from an hourly "seat-filling" contractor to a thriving product development company.
The pivot away from services couldn't happen overnight, and there was significant resistance from employees who felt secure under the old system. We had to organize into Empowered Product Teams, and I led Lean UX analyses of all processes for maximum efficiency. Greater transparency and a unified vision were required to convince the rest of the company to follow leadership's plan.
Further, since our primary clients were from the Department of Defense, it was a challenge to get access to users for research. Many of them did their work in classified areas or on the front lines, places that we could not go.
I established strong outreach programs to show users how the research would benefit them, and ultimately was able to get access to several military bases for user testing.
Extensive interviews were required to properly map and enhance every stage of the user's journey.
Simplified topographical maps brought much-needed clarity to the painful process of network mapping.
The process of evaluating a network of thousands of nodes is both time-consuming and demoralizing. It can be hard to grasp the complexities at a glance, and typical interfaces are dated. My concepts updated the sensibilities, while still falling in line with user expectations for iconography and functionality.
But it's not enough to be stylish. The designs were then tested with real-world users against the benchmark heuristics of usability. Those tests continued all through the development, keeping feedback loops short to avoid waterfall development.
Perhaps the most crucial benefit Alex has brought to CodeMettle is cultivating a culture that highly values its customers and seeks to deeply understand how our solutions can solve their problems. I rank hiring Alex as one of the best and most impactful hirings of my career.
-Jeff Bradley, CodeMettle VP of Product
In 2016, Acuity Brands began a heavy series of acquisitions to create their boldest product offering yet: lights that could track customers through retail stores, airports and more for unparalleled insight. Every new company supplied a piece of the puzzle... but they weren't talking to one another.
The mission? Unify seven sprawling applications across ten different tech stacks by coordinating four companies around the world.
Enterprise-first questions gave the users topsight through data rollups while enabling them to explore for greater insight.
Monitoring skyscrapers or even portfolios of buildings for maintenance, security and traffic information requires a multipronged research approach.
This wasn't a simple matter of pleasing a single user persona. Building owners, store managers, lighting agencies, retailer analytics divisions and others all needed to interact with the system in one way or another. Much of the difficulty came from the fact that the system was easy to use, but hard to install.
I launched a contextual inquiry effort spanning three countries to study not only our users, but our customers and even our own installation contractor staff. What we found were efficiencies that ran the gamut from clever design choices to improved informational paperwork.
In the end, we wanted to be sure that, no matter what aspect of the software you were interacting with, it was dead simple. Whether you were a building owner looking for maintenance data, a retail analyst checking out customer flow, or a commissioner stuck inside a half-constructed skyscraper, you knew exactly where to go for answers and what you needed next.
"What sets Alex apart is the combination of strategic thinking, user-centric approach, and ability to collaborate effectively across teams. Deep understanding of both design principles and customer needs makes Alex an asset to any organization."
-Mario Montag, Turntide General Manager
White-labeled versions of the software enabled retailers to have their own branding for operations centers, kiosks, etc.