Brad Sarro | Designing AI Security Solutions

A Unified AI Security Hub

Delivering a responsive enterprise security solution for JCI's siloed product stack and introducing holistic design practices into an old business process.

Discovery

Showing the business value by discovery, outcomes gained trust to invest in UX research and started a new holistic design culture for this old enterprise.

Progression

During this project I grew into a Design Lead by coaching my team to overcome business complexities and deliver a meaningful solution for users.

Layout Wow

A core solution in this work was envisioning a responsive foundation for custom layouts that wouldn't break from new feature offerings and long-term customization.

A Place For OOUX

JCI's product stack had an immense catalog of tools and functions. I leveraged project onboarding as a way to organized this massive catalog of tools using an Object Oriented UX exercise.

This cataloging effort was also delivered as a business value where an organized outline of features provided a clean foundation to the tool hierarchy design and unblocked my team to conduct additional research exercises.

Hi, I'm Pete!

Traveling onsite to various airports and guarded facilities we conducted user interviews to outline user needs and frustrations. These findings were packaged into a series of personas that would drive empathy-centered design decisions.

Our Super User persona was born at 4:34pm on a Tuesday, June 22, 2021. Peter Johns would grow to become the foundation of jobs to be done and a voice for existing user frustrations.

Inspiring Their Start Towards A Holistic Design Culture

A design-lead concept was unknown to JCI. They assumed good UX design operates like a comp factory, rapidly grinding out screen after screen to build. This friction blocked my team's efforts to continue conducting research to drive insights.

I directed my team to show the value of our holistic design efforts, instead of trying to argue why these efforts are crucial to our process. We hade enough to show that good design delivers value at every stage, not just shiny screens to code.

Foundational Layouts

To mitigate the icky and complicated risks of broken layouts, I outlined a responsive web paradigm that simplifies clean views with the freedom of user customization.

Containers push and pull on neighboring containers, allowing users to add and adjust panel sizes. Adjacent defaulted containers fill voids for a layout that doesn't fracture in use.

Priority Monitoring Preservation

Complex workflows once broke high priority monitoring from popups and overlapping windows. This negatively increased response times for real world emergencies.

Leveraging the layout foundation, I advocated for high priority panels that preserve essential monitoring feeds. This allows users to navigate through those complex workflows (such as evidence gathering and law enforcement submissions) without missing live and vital information feeds.

Video Tool Overlay

The design decisions we made alleviated user pain points for on-screen interactions by building out input trigger states.

For example: when users hover or tap a video feed, the HUD opacity increases to 100% and a dark backdrop improves readability. After 3 seconds of no user input, the opacity and video feeds return to normal.

Camera controls such as Pan • Tilt • Zoom (PTZ) are also interactive within video panes. Our design approach took inspiration from the real-world controllers for a unified design language between physical and digital spaces.

Improving AI Interactions

Object Recognition was a big AI feature for the market's future. I showed the business an overlooked need where user's felt a disconnect between their configuration settings and what AI object recognition actually discovered.

The solution was to include thoughtful labels across AI inputs that match human expectations with the core functionality for a more intuitive human - AI experience.

The Outcome

JCI went to bring in Google as an enterprise client, for their global building security. Our success was well received from published critics stating:

"A unified Access Control and Video Security solution delivering superior user experience at lower cost"

I feel the most satisfying win from this project was the organizational change we were able to inspire and build the new pillar of holistic design within Johnson Controls International.

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