Leading 0 to 1 product design for the IoT product suite with the mission to create Arm's next $1B in revenue.
Arm's technology has a staggering reach – approximately 70% of the world's population uses it. Therefore, I was honored and excited to help lead customer-centric design for the IoT product division of a company whose tech is being used by, well... almost everyone!
Our group designed & developed four products, each of which involved using IoT, AI, & ML technologies to meet critical needs of our customers in defined vertical markets.
Role
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- Principal Experience Designer for the IoT Products Group
- Product Design Lead for:
- Pelion Design System
- Pelion ML (Machine Learning)
- Space Analytics
- Pick Path
- LINQ
Responsibilities
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- Lead product design for all Arm IoT products
- Unify the visual & interaction design patterns throughout the entire product suite
- Research & develop new IoT product opportunities in targeted verticals
- Collaborate with PM's and Directors of Product in the definition of the product requirements and features
- Create & deliver crisp and developer-friendly product design guidance for the 160+ members of the engineering team, including IA, high-fidelity mockups, & interactive prototypes
- Work with the dev teams to ensure that the built products match the fidelity of the designs
- Continually improve all products, betas, & alphas
- Inspire a customer-centric revolution throughout all divisions of Arm
Results
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- Co-created the Arm Pelion atomic design system, consisting of a centralized repo of modular React components that create UI coherence and accelerate the pace of product design & development
- Leading the ground-up design of multiple Arm products that leverage the power of IoT and ML (machine learning)
- Performing extensive & ongoing customer research, including qualitiative and quantitative research, clickable prototype testing, and usability testing
- Created the Arm Customer-Centric Product Design Kit, which provides key resources to optimize the collaboration between UX, Product Owners, and developers throughout all stages of the product design process
Space Analytics
Space Analytics is a smart dashboard, control center, and data analytics platform fed by IoT sensors installed in businesses that delivers key and actionable insights about the occupancy status of every floor and room of our customers' facilities.
Our initial use case was to use this technology to help maximize occupancy levels in commercial facilities, such as hotels and shared work spaces.
Then COVID struck... and our product had to pivot, radically.
The Problem
COVID-19 has created a potentially life-threatening crisis in workplaces throughout the world.
In response, countless businesses have closed their facilities and switched to all-remote work.
Businesses that rely on work done on premises must find a way to safely bring their employees back to their workplaces, or else they will have no option but to close their doors permanently.
The Solution
Empower businesses to reopen during a health pandemic while ensuring the safety of all their occupants. We will achieve this by creating a data-rich command center for Facility Managers that enables them to monitor their facilities, identify trouble-spots, and take quick action to limit exposure to pathogens and trace contact events. This command center will receive key data by arrays of IoT sensors installed throughout our clients’ facilities.
We will know we have succeeded when our clients are able to easily & efficiently:
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- Monitor occupancy levels in their facilities (both real-time & historical)
- Find workspaces with low occupant density to use as alternatives to high-density areas
Identify physical distancing violations - Define & view guidance for the suggested flow of traffic through the facility
- View key safety metrics for defined time periods
- Customize the health & safety parameters for each facility
Product Design Plan
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- Competitive analysis — Study existing market leaders & products in the space
- Interviews — Screen, recruit, and scedule interviewees, and then run weekly interviews to learn about our target customers, their businesses, and their needs.
- Research analysis — Extract essential quotes and findings from research & perform affinity mapping to identify key patterns
- Personas — Incarnate research findings and share widely across divisions internally to build awareness of our target customers
- Hypotheses — Sketch many divergent possible solutions to our customer's key need, test in research sessions, and the converge on the best solution
- Rapid prototype — Quickly build clickable a prototype of the most viable solution
- Usability testing — Observe our research participants as they use the prototype to meet their goals, document their experience, and identify features and elements that require improvement
- Iterate - Continue to design & test until the prototype is ready for production
- Build — Collaborate with the Product Mangager and engineering lead as the work is loaded into JIRA as stories, assigned to dev's, and built
- Evaluate & continually improve — Participate in sprint reviews, identify areas that need improvement, and (when possible) invite customers into sprint reviews to provide their feedback directly to the product team
Competitive Analysis
Market research affirmed our sense that we had targeted a promising business opportunity.
We identitified numerous established players in the space, including several that were already earning tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
We identitified numerous established players in the space, including several that were already earning tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
This included offerings by industry giants Honeywell, Siemens, and the newest high-profile entrant to the space, Microsoft.
Primary Persona
0ver the course of weekly interviews with customers and customer-prospects, and after analyzing our research data, we created the following primary persona.
Early Product Definition
1.
Sensors and beacons installed in the workplace measure the occupancy, physical separation, and people flow throughout the facility, including open desk areas, conference rooms, corridors, break rooms, and the lobby.
2.
Data from each of these IoT devices is piped into a platform that displays 4 key metrics: 1) Real-time occupancy, 2) Physical distancing hotspots, 3) Occupied / available workspaces, and 4) Foot traffic flow.
3.
Facility Managers use this dashboard to monitor, track, and improve the layout of the facility, to be alerted of possible illness events, and to trace contact with people who may be sick.
4.
Employees and use this dashboard to plan where to sit, what areas to avoid, and what routes to take in the facility.
Ideation
Working closely with Product Manager, we created sketches of the dashboard, what key data it needed to show, and how it could be best organized
Here's an early version...
We identitified numerous established players in the space, including several that were already earning tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
This included offerings by industry giants Honeywell, Siemens, and the newest high-profile entrant to the space, Microsoft.
Question, Test, & Iterate
Our team's mantra was "Test early & often," and that's exactly what we did. We met with customers on a weekly basis, performed extensive interviews, did frequent usability testing, and documented and shared our findings internally.
42
User interviews
12
Interviewees
5
Unique enterprises
This enabled us to quickly indentify and prioritize key features and functionality, rapidly improve the UX, and the polish the UI.
Arm Team Feedback
"Shalom is by far one of the best UX designers I have ever worked with. He has an amazing ability to understand how all of the required information, elements, and user interactions should come together within a single application framework. His designs are elegant, intuitive, and incredibly easy to use. Shalom is also one of most positive and dedicated team members I have had the pleasure to work with. He is passionate about great design, and he brings an incredible amount of positive energy and enthusiasm to every project that he works on. Our engineering team here at Arm is responsible for the rapid prototyping and implementation of new technology solutions, and we simply could not do our work without Shalom. The amazingly detailed (and often animated) designs that he has generated have inspired all of us to do some of our best engineering work."
- T. H., Lead Software Engineer
"Shalom is an individual who is immediately impactful to any organization or program. Not only does he bring a toolset that brings expert-level UX contributions, his ability to develop and deploy frameworks and his approach to working with others draws out the best in collaboration to drive stretch goals that produce great products. He has been a driver of customer-centricity in our organization, aligning stakeholders in an extremely technical product group focused on technical users and proving the value of customer-centricity in our overall approach and through multiple process refinements. Shalom is an agent of change, in the most positive sense. I would recommend him for any organization that seeks to realize competitive advantage through customer-centricity."
- C. M., VP of New Business Development
