SOTI Connect is an IoT management solution that empowers organizations to effectively manage and gain visibility into the diverse and numerous IoT-enabled devices throughout their operations, while reducing the total cost of ownership of those devices.
SOTI Connect is one of seven product solutions that fall under the SOTI ONE Platform. As the newest addition to the product suite, Connect aims to help organizations manage IoT-enabled devices, which can be subscribed to as either stand-alone or in conjunction with the the other SOTI solutions. In summary, device administrators can use SOTI Connect to remotely update, configure, reboot, and query the state of devices, and perform other actions permitted by the device manufacturer. Since Connect was built using the same architecture & back-end as the other SOTI services, it was my job to ensure all designs, flows & experiences remain consistent with the other products.
As one of 7 Product Designers on the global UX team (each designer responsible for a given product) I was responsible for:
Facilitating weekly design sync-ups with the Connect team (1 product owner, 2 product owner interns, 1 product manager, 2 senior software engineers, 8 software engineers)
Collaborating with the internal design team (designers only)
Presenting major product updates & walkthroughs
Conducting user feedback sessions
Brainstorming & Ideation
Wire-framing & Prototyping
Prior to joining the SOTI team, user & market research was already conducted and therefore, was not part of the standard practice for product designers. Two UX researchers were responsible for conducting interviews & focus groups for specific initiatives. Feedback was then passed on to designers for implementation.
Since there were many features that contributed to the overall design of SOTI Connect (and not one specific), I decided to display one of my white-boarding sessions as an example to showcase my typical ideation process.
Rough white-boarding session for automation rules
Refined user journey map for automation rules
Responsive design is imperative in today’s age. The biggest challenge with this was designing the components in a way that was usable on mobile devices. The secondary navigation to indicate neighbourhood pages is made into a horizontal tab bar instead of the vertical tab bar on desktop.
After each major product release, SOTI Connect held company-wide feedback sessions to uncover any issues with usability and intuitiveness. The results of these sessions were then consolidated by a PM, who would then pass off to the product’s designer to implement changes based off feedback.
