EcoFactor

Ecofactor
At Ecofactor, I was responsible for the look and feel of both the back office enterprise application (Insight) as well as the consumer facing dashboard, mobile, app, and savings calculator. Below are some of the designs I worked on.

Ecofactor Mobile

The mobile app consisted of about 15 screens. The two shown here were early prototypes of the home screen showing all of your locations (multiple connected homes). The Away mode was a quick and easy way to turn off your HVAC system when nobody is home. The cool part of this was that you could create saved schedules to automate the HVAC process based on a set of rules that you define and it would automatically adjust the program through a connected smart thermostat based on environmental factors like weather and demand response events.

-- Photoshop and Ilustrator

Process flow

After speaking with customers and internal stake holders as well as installers and service reps, we built out a simple decision based flow of all the mobile screens. This high level view gave the team an easy to understand view of the mobile experience. This single process flow diagram literally replaced 7 pages of documentation and greatly improved the clarity behind all of the interactions.

Simple interactions

Even the best ideas can become frustrating on a tiny cell phone screen if users struggle to complete simple tasks. Customers remember the pain of not being able to achieve what they want on the first try, leading to bad reviews, poor adoption, and potential lost revenue.

By enlarging controls and designing an intuitive metaphor for navigation, users could quickly scroll to their desired settings with minimal effort. This approach significantly reduced the error rate and created a smoother, more enjoyable experience.

User testing

Once the flow and screens were finalized, we conducted extensive testing to represent different modes in a clear and visually striking way. This involved experimenting with various color treatments, button styles, and interaction models, such as trays and sliders, to find the most intuitive and engaging design for users.

Embedded UI

I worked closely with a team of engineers at one of our hardware partners to simplify their embedded thermostat control system. The main challenge was designing a user-friendly experience for a device operated by just three buttons, with strict constraints on menu depth and memory usage.

Initially, setting up or programming a weekly schedule averaged 9 minutes. After my rework, this process was reduced to just over 3. Moreover, we developed a web front end that enabled users to program their thermostat visually, making the experience even more seamless without ever needing to touch the physical device.

Legacy Styles

When I joined, I was charged with re-designing various usage charts within the limitations of an existing design system.

In this screen, users were experiencing problems hovering over specific dates to see details for the day. When a user had a year to scroll through, it's impossible to target the correct data point because the data was just way too dense. Here, I adopted a standard stock style chart that allowed the user to zoom in and out of the entire data set and pan the focus in real time. This allowed the data points to be displayed in a more usable density and greatly improved readability and performance.