I was the lead designer on a project tasked with reimagining the interactions for a software tool that controls the cameras, remote door locks, and personnel entry records for a building. The existing tool had evolved to incorporate new features and the interactions to manage and access their different kinds of data felt disjointed and unintuitive.
To redesign the tool, I focused on who would use the features and when they would use them. The vast majority of the tool’s use would be by security guards monitoring the building and occasionally clicking into a feed to focus on the data or video. Far less often, a security manager would setup the interactions of which data appeared on the building map, and they would not be concerned with the feeds occuring while they setup the controls. With this perspective in mind, I convinced the client to let go of a small managerial settings window that shared the screen with live feeds to allow the entire screen to be devoted to the task at hand of customizing the tool for that building.
The next important change was to move away from distinct interactions for every type of data and create a common set of interactions that would lead to any possible feature in the software. The original software had distinct starting points for every feature but the new design had a single starting point for customization and followed a narrowing path until the user found the desired capability. This narrowing path design was influenced by the Mac finder window where selecting from a left-side vertical list at each level of choice will use the right side of the window to highlight the selected item and, in this case, perform the work of customization.
After several rounds of feedback from my fellow designers and the client’s product owner and engineer, I worked with a visual designer to create a visual language, polished look and feel, and deliver pixel-perfect final designs and assets to the client.