The Company
SMS Assist (acquired by Lessen in 2023) uses technology to facilitate property maintenance for its retail and residential clients. The company has a robust and successful Product department that uses human-centered design to create enterprise software. Our department has realized a 10x return on investment.
My Role
As Lead UX Architect, I participated in—and usually led—all phases of product discovery, design, and testing. This includes activities like ideation workshops, design workshops, journey mapping, shadowing, concept testing, wireframing, usability testing, and leveraging our design system to create final designs. In my time at the company I became known as a “complexity refiner”, thriving on difficult projects.
As Director of Design I took on higher-level strategic work, as well as managing the team and mentoring so that each employee could be their best.
The Project
SMS Assist wanted to leverage our preventive maintenance program to collect asset data for our clients. This idea was to create a simple and non-intrusive process for an HVAC technician to collect info on the HVAC units there.
My Tasks
Discovery, shadowing, ideation, wireframing, usability testing.
Discovery
Stakeholder needs
Our primary business stakeholder wanted a step by step mobile PM guide for technicians—to insure they have done all Preventive Maintenance tasks properly—that would lead into an asset collection component where the tech would enter in model numbers and serial numbers.
Vendor research
In meetings, our vendors told us that they can’t allocate much extra time per PM appointment for asset collection, so the flow envisioned by our stakeholder would not work—not to mention that these techs are pros and don’t need or want to be told how to do their job.
The truly eye-opening moment for us was during shadowing, when we followed an HVAC technician up onto the roof. On the roof it is bright and hot—you can’t see your phone in the sun, and you want to spend as little time up there as you can. The technicians would never use the app while up there.
The Solution
Components of the solution
- We would add subsection to our existing vendor tech app, focused on PMs.
- Knowing our affiliates will really only look at the app in their air conditioned truck before and after the PM, we focus on setting expectations (“be sure to take pictures!”) and enabling them to complete the process after they’ve come down from the roof.
- We knew we’d be hard-pressed to get them to enter a serial numbers and model numbers, so instead we had them take label photos.
- Our eventual goal was to use OCR to read those labels, but in the short term we decided on using an offshore data team to read the labels and do data entry. We created a data entry tool (which we called ARIA) to enable those data entry folks to enter the data in and match the new information against previously collected data.
