CASE STUDY

SECURITY & SAFETY THINGS

Design impacts for launching the platform

OVERVIEW

Security & Safety Thing is a Bosch IoT startup for B2B security industry. We provide a platform for businesses to turn security cameras into a smart camera that works with any AI-driven apps from our application store, as well as for application developers to develop apps and sell them in our store.

This is a documentation of design impacts towards our platform launch. We have managed to take challenging states of our products within a very tight schedule and turn those into delightful products. 

During the course of 9 months, I have fostered collaboration models, updated our tools, came up with process frameworks, as well as pushing the design team to go beyond and everyone to work together to create a better user experience while keeping the feasibility and viability.

WHAT WE DID

• User journey mapping
  
  
• Conducting a heuristic analysis
  
  
• Facilitating user testings
  
  
• Building cross-products prototypes
  
  
• Synthesizing research outcomes
  
  
• Providing research training for PMs and POs
  
  
• Defining product roadmaps
  
  
• Creating one scrum board for design, PMs and POs
  
  
• Refining and training on writing user stories
  
  
• Optimizing collaboration with PMs and POs
  
  
• Evolving collaboration model with the engineering team
  
  
• Facilitating cross-disciplinary collaboration
  
  
• Introducing figma
  
  
• Establishing daily design reviews
  
  
• Building design system
  
  
• Refining sprint process, sprint reviews and retrospectives

OUTCOMES

50

Number of fixed severe UX issues

x2

Doubled speed and capacity

3 BIG TAKE AWAYS

01. Improved user experience

02. Increased quality of design

03. Optimized processes

01

Improved user experience

APPROACH

Taking a holistic look at the full experience across products and establishing different research methods to assess gaps in the experience.

HEURISTIC ANALYSIS

Introduction of a framework for standardized heuristic analysis based on Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics. 

The issues are rated based on frequency, impact and persistence. Those with higher severity were prioritised for the launch and the rest have been added to the backlog.

USER JOURNIES

Mapping the end-to-end journey for integrators & developers. Conducting journey assessment to identify gaps and opportunities for improvements.

All journeys were reviewed and outcomes had been documented as stories in the backlog. We worked to prioritise which of these issues to address before the launch. They also informed our focus areas for user testing.

USER TESTING

Facilitating user testing of key flows and evaluating the new navigation model. Creating cross-products interactive prototypes. 

Running the user testing participants through a prototype by giving them core tasks and observing.

Making sure that cross-products experiences are tested. Prioritizing key issues from the testing to address before launching.

Ran hands-on training with the design team to synthesise our raw testing notes, then worked with the POs and PMs to prioritise which issues could be addressed for the launch.

Along the way, we have set up a repeatable framework for user testing.

02

Increased quality of design

IMPROVED NAVIGATION MODEL

“Now I don't know where I am, how do I go back where I was?”  — a system integrator 

PRODUCT
DIFFERENTIATOR

“I usually have to log in manually for each camera and it takes so much time up and hustles to organize all the information”  — a system integrator 

ONBOARDING

“What is this platform I just joined and how do I get started using it?” — a system integrator 

“Where can I find the app I've just purchased? How do I install it to the camera?”  — a system integrator 

EASIER SEARCH & NAVIGATION

“I am getting lost in the sea of information, not sure where to start..”  — an application developer

SALES TRACKING
& PAYOUT

“I spent way too much time to organize my orders and payments on excel sheets...”  — an application developer 

03

Optimized proccesses

FUTURE FEATURES

Training of PMs and POs on different types of design research for exploring future opportunity areas.

PRODUCT ROADMAPS

Working together with PMs to define product roadmaps to help prioritise customer needs and guiding POs what features to prioritise for design and development.

ONE SCRUM BOARD

Unified separated boards into one and encouraging the ownership of the board for PMs and POs. Aligned prioritisation of the topics provides the most value for our customers/partners - and for our business.

BACKLOG
REFINEMENT

Providing training and guidance on writing user stories from user perspectives. Revising the existing backlog to improve the sprint velocity and collaborations.

COLLABORATION
MODEL

Optimizing collaboration model with PMs and POs. Guiding them to own a vision. Support writing user stories from a user perspective. Have POs prioritise user stories for design.

*It is purely to illustrate different parts of the process in a digestible way. The actual process may not be as linear as it is presented here.

DESIGN &
DEVELOPMENT

As a first step moving from feature-driven approach to user centric and more dynamic collaboration model. The design team works 2 sprint ahead of the development team and will output new/updated stories.

*It is purely to illustrate our process evolution. Not a representation of suggested process for all orgs.

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY

Bringing PMs, POs, engineers, sales, marketing on the same table/figma file for collaborating to share, align, ideate and prioritize for various topics. This helped us to have maximized design outputs.

DESIGN REVIEW

Providing the team regular opportunities to practice presenting and critiquing one another’s work, as well as ensuring that the design solutions are always aligned with one another.

FIGMA

Coming up with a framework for documenting designs directly in figma, rather than copying them to Confluence and describing all the interaction guidelines there. We cut documentation time in half.

DESIGN SYSTEM

Building design system for speed and better collaboration. Designed and coded components in a systematic way — to accelerate the speed and strengthen the collaboration process. This is still in progress.

SPRINT PROCESS

Refined sprint process, sprint reviews and retrospectives. Reduced sprint cycle from 3 to 2 weeks. Reduced time for sprint review from 2 to 1 hour. Installed bi-weekly retrospectives to collect feedback on how to improve the collaboration model.