Principled Product Development

As a design/development consultant, I worked closely with Redwood's software team to redesign many of the initial interfaces used to setup and control the hardware used in smart building management. Designing UIs to address pain points in legacy products and to implement new features required a principled approach, prioritizing uniformity, usability, and user needs.

Principles/Heuristics

• Context-Driven Content. Identifying target users for applications should dictate the service or settings revealed. Benefits: Minimized noise, improved user focus on tasks.
• Modular Components. Refining and reusing purpose-built UI components establishes common workflows and eliminates duplicated work. Benefits: scalability, code reusability, reinforced learning, separation of concerns.
• Considerate UIs. Usability relies on communicating states clearly. On a related note, components should rely on shared data services as the single source of truth. Benefits: Keeping users engaged and informed through task completion minimizes errors and confusion.

Research-Based Design Artifacts

Preliminary artifacts such as flow diagrams, journey maps, and wireframes were used to frame pain points and task flows, highlighting options for exploring and testing the happy or key path to completion. Future iterations relied on prototypes capturing microinteractions and data.

Modular Single-Purpose Applications

Originally an all-in-one tool for endpoint setup/control, Redwood Manager was reconceived as multiple single-purpose apps to separate concerns, reduce dependencies, and minimize the cognitive load on users. Prototypes populated with data provided touchpoints for validation and iteration.