Infogrid is changing the world through building intelligence.
Our AI-powered platform gathers and analyses data from the smartest IoT technology to drive our mission of making every building healthy, efficient and sustainable.
Infogrid is an IoT startup that helps people who manage buildings make them work better. From large scale installation flows to alerts and detailed analysis of data, our solutions help customers to solve Occupancy, Air Quality, Water Safety and many more problems across their estates. I joined Infogrid as employee number 30 and as of December 2022 there are 300+ of us. Along the way I have been at the heart of our most significant product strategy and feature developments. Additionally, I have lead design across the 4 highest performing squads in the company.
Additional team on all work shown: Megan Ellis, Ilya Zaprutski, Seppo Taaminen, Alan Offord, James Crowther, Anastasia Zaikovskaya, Hanno Sarg, Yuri Yoshimura, Steven Biggs
4x
Played an active roll in scaling the Infogrid design team from 2 to 8 people
10x
Helped increase in our user base over the course of 2 years
When I joined Infogrid, the user experience of our product was extremely disjointed. It was not designed to structure or display data at scale across many locations.
An open folder structure caused hierarchical and navigational chaos in the app. This lead to varying folder structures that did not reflect the physical aspects of buildings in any way. As a result we were unable to derive intelligent analysis at a space or space-type (e.g. bathrooms) level.
The story of the data was shown at a sensor level and not ready to scale. For the most part, users had to look at data at a per-sensor level. Sensor lists are long and difficult to navigate. This means that understanding data at the level of a space, floor building or many buildings at a time was impossible. Additionally, data from sensors was not always visualised legibly or accessibly.
Charts were poorly designed and little attention had been paid to the details of our interface. Through the course of my many initial conversations with stakeholders across the company, a few core issues created a series of interrelated problems. It was clear these would prevent our app working at any kind of scale or serving a high quality user experience.
The voice of our customers was not informing our vision, strategy or designs. Additionally, the product was being developed framed around the sensors being used, not the solutions we were providing to customers.
I helped to spearhead qualitative product research practices and used the findings to evolve the direction of our product.
From tooling to process, I helped our teams with best practice for running qualitative research and discovery with existing and prospective users, as well as subject matter experts. Until that point, no-one in the business could represent the needs and goals of users in an unbiased, objective way. Establishing a regular practice of research sessions and knowledge sharing armed Product and Design teams with the knowledge and resources to inform decisions in a user needs-oriented way.
By emphasising the interoperability of our solutions and highlighting the benefits of a connected system, our sales teams were able to upsell larger and more diverse deployments. This also provided us with a scalable and more relatable framework for understanding our customers' buildings and telling their stories.
After a period of close collaboration with stakeholders and customers, a new vision for Infogrid emerged; designed for scale and centred around core user needs.
Working closely with the Head of Design, we created a new product vision for Infogrid. Designed to serve large scale deployments of sensors, we envisaged features that served the needs of customers managing complex buildings at scale. Over the next year we scaled the design team to a total of 8 people who would help us improve and implement our vision. I led the frontend UX/UI for nearly all solutions in the platform.
Our new vision required us to move away from an open folder structure to a universal one based around the concept of buildings, floors, spaces and space types
Users need to navigate their data quickly and intuitively, based on the buildings, floors or spaces that are being measured. To derive intelligent insights from the data, estate hierarchies also required the creation of space-types which became a way to group and aggregate data from many spaces based on a common tag.
BUILDING FEATURES ON TOP OF NEW INSIGHTS AND DATA STRUCTURES
“How has one or many buildings been performing for a specific Infogrid solution that I have bought?”
Creating a universal hierarchy for estates enabled us to begin serving core customer needs. Now we could analyse large, aggregated amounts of historical data and give users easy ways to answer the most important questions they had — revolutionising how reporting worked in the app.
“Tell me the information that will help me make better decisions, in a way that is easy to consume”
In addition to presenting deep-dives of data based on specific questions a user is trying to answer, I also worked closely with Data Science colleagues to develop an approach to automated analysis. This formed part of an evolving vision of the role Data Science could play in the product going forward.
Automated analysis served a core customer need for answers at their fingertips, which didn’t require the detailed evidence that a visualisation provides. By implementing this in the app we saved countless hours of CS teams and others who were previously manually analysing data and creating reports for customers. The ability to self-serve complicated data analysis at scale gave users an immediate understanding of trends, anomalies and patterns in the data that were previously undiscoverable.
FEATURES FOR TEAMS ON THE GROUND DOING REACTIVE WORK
"How is a single building performing right now (across all solutions), and what needs to be addressed immediately?"
We wasted no time in leveraging our new estate hierarchy and created building view. This feature enables building managers and teams ‘on the ground’ to understand how a specific location is performing, and what needs attention.
Tools to monitor a building and react when something needs attention — viewable on any device
Presented in both a list and map view, users can easily monitor buildings in real time with data at their fingertips. Filtering specific solutions shows the most relevant information for a given space or floor.
CUSTOM VIEWS FOR POWER USERS
"How are many buildings performing right now (across all solutions)?"
Widgets enable users to create custom dashboards of live data across many locations for the purposes of finding and fixing problems quickly. We created many widgets across all solutions. Each one is focused on a specific problem and tells the real-time story of one or many locations.
Previous Project:
Qubit
Web personalisation and data product with character
Next Project:
Bright Advice
Fintech democratising retirement advice and planning
Ronan Kelly
Currently:
Product Designer at Sweep
I have spent 10 years helping companies of all sizes to design solutions for complex problems. To do this, I combine user centered product and graphic design practices that create engaging, successful digital products.
