Architectural lighting and energy management innovation
Philips Lighting is the world’s leading provider of architectural lighting design and energy management systems. Its technologies have given building owners the power and creativity to illuminate their buildings and landmarks with unlimited combinations of luminaires and color schemes. Philips has also created a software-based lighting & energy management system that allows building owners to realize significant energy savings by centrally monitoring and controlling their systems.
Proof of concept to production
Like many enterprise applications, the software used to support these applications have been shaped by engineers with a specific perspective of the products and their capabilities. The existing tools also lacked the ability to manage multiple buildings or to address individual controls with the level of flexibility that customers need. Similarly, while the energy management system was powerful, the interfaces initially envisioned by the product team was overly complex, lacked customer-centric design approach and didn’t allow building owners and operators to modify the energy use of thousands of buildings simultaneously. Our team was selected by Philips to help design a suite of applications that would support these product features across multiple customer personas.
By understanding and documenting common workflows for each user type, we envisioned experiences that aligned more closely with the way customers approach these tasks. With an understanding that building managers spend the majority of their time monitoring their buildings and projects to identify and resolve potential issues, we made those insights and features the focal point of the experience.
Each persona type had preferences for accessing building information and accessing certain features. To support the majority of users, we created a flexible and responsive experience to satisfy both majority use cases and edge cases. And regardless of their role, building managers and administrators can access these critical data and feature from any device.
We achieved our objective of simplifying the complexity of the app without sacrificing the power of the system – one that supports thousands of locations, devices and control points in a single interface. Switching between buildings and projects was simple and intuitive and each building had a dedicated dashboard with the most important alerts and analytics pushed to the forefront in a fully responsive experience.