Canopy

I was hired by Banyan Hills Technologies to re-envision their IoT platform that monitors and manages large networks of smart devices. Despite its advanced capabilities, Canopy had received mixed feedback from users regarding its usability and overall user experience.

Discovery

To get a better understanding of how Canopy's customers were interacting with the product I used the following research methods.

• Analytics: Examined data and user behaviour from the current platform to identify common patterns, bottlenecks and drop-off points.
• Interview: Conducted in-depth interviews with existing users to gather insights into their experiences, challenges and expectations.
• Surveys: Distributed a survey to Canopy's user base to gather data on user satisfaction, frequency of use and specific features they find the most and least useful.

Key Findings

The discovery phase led to the following key findings:

• Complicated Interface: The platform's interface wasn't very user-friendly, making it difficult for users to navigate and complete tasks efficiently.
• Improved Filtering: Customers with large datasets had a hard time locating specific items due to limited filtering and sorting options.
• Lack of Customization: Many customers expressed the need for more personalization the ability to create custom dashboards and have a quicker way to access frequently used device actions.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Now, that I understood the pain points I was targeting, I moved on to wireframing. This phase is all about structure and reworking the layout without getting bogged down by details. I shared these wireframes with the team, gathered feedback and iterated on the designs.

High-Fidelity Mockups

Once the wireframes were approved, it was time to bring the design to life with high-fidelity mockups. This phase focuses on the aesthetics, branding and interactive elements.

I wanted to leverage material design as a strong foundation for the new design system that had to be created. The thought was to spend less time re-inventing every wheel and more time designing the new "canopy specific wheels" needed for the platform (not the best analogy).

Page Builder

A huge enhancement I concieved and directed was our page building tool which allowed users to choose from a library of widgets and place them anywhere on the page.

This was the first of many steps towards empowering our customers to personalize Canopy to fit their needs while also keeping our internal team from having to spend extra cycles creating niche pages for customers. (huge win)

Other Notable Enhancements

• Pinned Actions: We added the ability for customers to pin an action to the top of the actions panel. These pinned actions would then show up in a few places in our platform making frequently used actions less difficult to find.
• Filter Cards: Using an intuitive rule builder UI we gave customers the ability to save complex filters and turn them into 'one click' buttons. This made it much easier to sort through data in Canopy and serve fringe use cases.
• Automations: Through visual scripting customers can trigger device actions that address hardware and software issues before they impact performance.