Products are designed for specific users, but what if the user base reflects literally dozens of different archetypes–everybody from a condo owner to a facilities manager at a skyscraper to the operations team of an urban hospital?
That was the challenge our team faced in designing and developing our latest product, the Meshify Protect™ mobile app.
As with all great products, the starting point was UX research. Through dozens of one-on-one sessions and even more conversations, Slacks, email messages–you name it, we did it–we unpacked how people were using current sensor mobile apps, highlighted key bright spots and painpoints, and iterated on wireframes and prototypes. We conversed and ideated with home users, commercial users, pro installers, call center team members, and operations staff. And along the way, we brought in the engineering team to see and hear these conversations, so that the context of how people would use their product could become more meaningful and inspiring.
In designing for the extremes of residential versus large commercial, there are always tradeoffs and gnarly UX decisions to be made. How do you issue alerts for campus environments where the first responder might not ever have a cell phone? How do you help the installer when they are deep underground where any signal–and certainly not a Wi-Fi signal–is limited or non-existent? When a user contacts our Sensor Support team, what is the best way to empower the customer service rep to provide assistance via the app? What type of at-a-glance sensor visualization makes sense for a building with over dozens of floors and nearly 300 sensors? These were just some of the interesting UX challenges we sought to address.
With the core design underway, our Product team laid down the epics and user stories that enable the foundation for developing the product. Suffice it to say, there were many tickets in Jira highlighting the various aspects of our new app across login, onboarding, activation, and monitoring. And as we worked through those tickets with the engineering team, we continued to resolve the edges of the design, accounting for scenarios that were potentially niche but important to resolve before going to development.
Nearly a year later, Meshify Protect v1 is launching. I truly believe it is a next generation sensor activation and monitoring mobile app, and not just by insurance standards. It’s a testament to all the people–including front end development, backend development, QA/Testing, customer success, operations, project/program management, product, UX/UI, our alpha testers, and our beta testers (just to name a few)–that we have brought a product so disruptive and truly scalable to the market.
And like every great product, Protect has some great stuff right from day 1, and we have a roadmap of features that are coming soon… so watch this space!
