SYNERGY is a B2B system for managing outdoor and indoor lighting. The initial requirements described the operation of configured lighting in detail, but did not connect site surveys, equipment selection, installation and commissioning. Following user surveys and scenario development, the team clarified the roles and brought these stages into a single workflow.
Project overview
My contribution
I conducted research and user surveys, took part in hallway testing, wrote user stories, and designed interfaces and interactive prototypes. I checked hypotheses with an analyst and users, participated in some testing, handed designs over to developers and carried out design reviews.
Team
The Product Manager was responsible for product direction, priorities and agreeing functionality with the business. The client's analyst helped explore the domain and align business processes. Frontend and backend developers and QA were involved in implementation.
Period
2022–2023
Status
Project completed at version 1.0
Early requirements · Research
The early materials focused on the map and equipment, lighting control, monitoring, incidents and analytics — work at a facility that was already set up. Comparing the requirements with the actual process revealed that site surveys, equipment selection, installation and commissioning were not yet connected in a single workflow with clear handoffs between participants.
A gap in the product model
The early requirements did not fully account for the actual facility commissioning process.
What was covered
What remained disconnected
Research · Role model
User surveys, discussions with the analyst and scenario development showed that the initial allocation of responsibilities was insufficient for commissioning a facility. The process needed explicit steps for surveying the site, reviewing the findings, selecting and approving equipment, installation, commissioning and handing the configured facility over to the operator. Without these steps, there was no clear path to bringing a facility into operation.
Early model
Supervisor · Operator · Administrator · Installer · Auditor · Commissioning specialist
The auditor only checked the installer's work. The boundaries between surveying, selection, installation and configuration remained unclear.
After research
Supervisor · Administrator · Auditor · Manager · Owner · Installer · Commissioning specialist · Operator
Added: manager and owner
The responsibilities of the auditor, installer, commissioning specialist, operator and administrator were linked to the essential stages and areas of accountability.
Seven operational roles handed work from one stage to the next: from project creation and site survey to commissioning and operation. The supervisor remained the eighth role in the overall model, responsible for oversight, statistics and reports, but was not part of the commissioning sequence.
Prototypes · Validation
Testing the interactive prototype revealed problems with maintaining context and completing tasks during mobile site surveys. The findings informed changes to the interface behaviour in key scenarios.
Observation
Solution
Outcome
The team connected project creation, site surveys, equipment selection, installation, commissioning and handover into operation in a minimal end-to-end workflow. Advanced operator functionality remained part of the target concept.
My work resulted in a process role model, user stories, interfaces and prototypes for different working contexts, alongside development support and design reviews.
