Duxbury Creative - Honeywell Forge Insights

Project Details

Employer: Honeywell, Inc

Date: September - November 2020

Programs: Sketch, Abstract, InVision, Figma, Confluence, Jira, Miro, Photoshop

Role: UX Designer

Skills: User Interviews, C&C Analysis, Wireframing, Hi-Fidelity Interactive Prototyping, Usability Testing, Documentation, QA

Online: Honeywell, Inc owns the copywrites to Forge Insights. If you would like to talk further about my involvement in this project please contact me.

Honeywell Forge Insights is a patent-pending web based application initially created for internal Honeywell with plans to release to external customers. The application's purpose is to improve and speed up decision making, in all areas of business from procurement to HR.

It achieves this goal by presenting important and previously disparate data in a readable, simple, and exciting UI. Forge Insights aggregates siloed data into one central location, while simultaneously improving the data models that feed it, but the most important focus of the application is to promote action by infusing predicted insights and or recommended actions into business processes.

The new insights or actions offered by the algorithms and data models will lead to actions that positively impact business outcomes by reaching the right stakeholders at the right time. The application also provide a timely feedback loop for the data models (that are used to create the business insights), analytics teams, and business leadership. The beauty of this application and what made it so exciting to work on is that it is so extensible and is setup to scale. Forge Insights can be used by so many different types of users in multiple lines of business and in varying levels within the hierarchy of a team, which made keeping it simple and targeted both fun and challenging.

2

Designers

5

Developers

5

Personas

6

Weeks

The Problem

Forge Insights offered problems to be solved for both our intended end-users and the Honeywell analytics and UX programs as well.

Internal Honeywell employees must traverse multiple siloed platforms and software to make informed and timely decisions. Not only is gathering the data they are analyzing cumbersome and slow but evaluating it is extremely manual and sometimes reliant on years of experience and intuition. They also use separate and equally time-consuming platforms to track their KPIs and annual goals (Key Performance Indicators) in order to provide their management with visibility into their progress.

Employees and management need an application that centralizes all the data they need to make sensible decisions, quickly understand the impact of those decisions and allows them to act, offers them a solution to follow up on the success or failure of that action. Secondary to making timely high impact actions, they also need to track annual KPIs to make performance reports faster and easier to compile.

Additional to the end-user problems that needed to be solved, the process of creating this product served as an opportunity to improve internal UX and product management procedures, as well as core analytics products that needed refinement.

The Solution

The solution fell into two main buckets:

Solution for the end-user:
A responsive, simple, and highly targeted web-based application that allows users to make punctual and well-informed decisions, allows them to follow up on actions, makes tracking goals and progress efficient, increases visibility for managers, and eases the burden of reporting on progress.

Solutions for the Product & UX Programs:

A gamified feedback feature that encourages users to provide data on the insights they are receiving thereby improving the data model and offering the engineering team important information on how to improve it.

Enhanced documentation and a report on Honeywell's new release management process, that would communicate the value of UX and market the ways in which UX can lead product strategy and improve customer outcomes by following a formalized process.

My Role

I was one of two designers on this project and co-led latter research, low to hi-fidelity design, usability testing, and QA.

Initial research and discovery were already completed before I joined the Forge Insights Team. While working on this product I was simultaneously upkeeping the Forge Design System and working on a Honeywell UX Design (Team) Site. The lead designer is really passionate about research and discovery and wanted to focus more heavily on those parts of the process. I knew she wanted assistance and requested to join her because it would allow me to experience the new Design System I helped create from a external perspective, as well as learn from a research savvy senior designer.

The main objectives of my role were to:

Design a vibrant and elegant solution infusing Forge's new design system and brand guidelines and integrate feedback and improvements into the design system product.
Create an extensible design prepared for future development and growth.
Follow and report back on Honeywell's new release management process and streamlined UX process.
Refine the visual design and ensure the product felt modern, exciting, direct, and urges action.