BigMeals goes with you from your planning journal, to the vendors, to the kitchen and the event venue.
Feeding dozens of people is no joke. Food allergies, appliance bottlenecks, recipe scaling and punch list tracking can all spell major headaches for hardworking chefs. BigMeals aims to give those folks the tools they need at an affordable price point, without adding overbearing systems.
This project exists because much of my portfolio is classified, proprietary or leadership-heavy. I wanted to create a fully-custom UI and tiny design kit to show my value as an individual contributor.
An atomic design system ensures consistency, perfect for tracking my brand colors through global variables.
All components have been created for quick editing, so potential team members can jump right in without breaking everything.
The mini design system was carefully atomized down to the colors.
The information you want, immediately.
Great interfaces aren't designed to force engagement at the cost of user experience. They impart the most important information as quickly as possible, with plenty of ways to recontextualize that information.
Commercial HVAC systems are extreme contributors to climate change and a major tax on the energy grid. Turntide's mission: 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 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, no one was sure who the users were anymore.
Enterprise-first questions gave the users topsight through data rollups while enabling them to explore for greater insight.
I was the design team lead at Turntide, providing strategic support across all aspects of production. It was my job to enhance and protect the design process, manage tons of stakeholders, ensure consistent experience across the org, and tack down leadership's vision and values for the system.
This role required significant individual contribution: developing screens and flows whenever resources were low, providing extensive customer and user research, and creating supporting collateral such as training videos and podcasts. However, the majority of my work was management, setting everyone up for success and guiding things to a perfect conclusion.
The designers on this project were exceptional, but they required a strong advocate and lots of research support to get their best results.
Getting together onsite gave the team a better ability to see eye-to-eye on difficult issues and agree on a shared vision.
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, such as general and mechanical contractors. Are they the customers? What about the facilities managers who need to know the status of their systems? Are they the users?
That's what the creators believed. For years, marketing and interface designs were geared toward that assumption. Individual device management was prioritized over massive fleets.
But that was wrong. On the scale of a skyscraper, the BMS cost was a drop in the bucket. Our important "customers" had no idea who we were, and didn't care to learn. They didn't choose us. Someone else way down the line did.
Worse still, facilities managers and general contractors have nothing to do with one another. We had a terrible fit, and we were serving too much information to people who couldn't even use it.
Our real users were the HVAC manufacturers 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 product 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.
CodeMettle initially brought me on as the UX section lead, taking over a team of five designers servicing a dozen teams across the org. There was no consistent design language or branding, and the teams were fractured and occasionally toxic. Design floundered without an advocate, unable to make progress on the long term goals that would evolve the company.
Over a year, I floated from project to project working in direct partnership with embedded designers on Agile teams. This gave me a chance for individual contribution, but it also enabled me to mentor designers while modeling a healthy dynamic with product leadership and engineering. During that time, I created the art style and brand for the company's flagship product, Terminus.
Management took notice as the design language of all our products came into alignment with glowing reviews. They wanted parity between the corporate experience and the user experience. I was promoted to VP of Design and tasked with assembling a marketing team to pull off the same stunt within the year.
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.
I developed original art and concepts to kickstart the process, demonstrating not only improved usability, but possibility.
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.
I started life at Acuity as a Staff UX Designer for the SVP of R&D. During this time, I produced mockups, wireframes and concepts for presentations to Home Depot, SAP and more, brainstorming the future possibilities of Acuity's cutting-edge systems. In the meantime, I visited projects and produced impact reports about who could benefit the most from the resource-strapped design team. Within six months, we had a list of targets of opportunity.
At that point, all designers within the company were reassigned to me, and I was promoted to Director of Design. Longstanding rivalries between UX departments melted as designers came together to find a community of support and understanding. We grew that into the UX Center of Excellence, operating in matrix with other teams. Embedded designers stayed close to their sources of truth, but could lean on others to empower themselves.
This job had a strong political component, working with dozens of powerful stakeholders across a host of acquisitions. The company had seen a massive spike in stock price from tech breakthroughs, and that came with strong opinions from acquired founders. For the first time in my career, I found myself spending a lot more time winning hearts and minds than creating designs.
I had to find a new way to measure my success as a designer, not just in technical prowess, but in the combined happiness and impact of the designers under my stewardship.
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.
White-labeled versions of the software enabled retailers to have their own branding for operations centers, kiosks, etc.