Con Edison
I am a Product Design Lead, building industry leading products that help enhance both internal and external customers, empowering them based on the three pillars of ConEd: safety, compliance and operational excellence.
Platform
Mobile, Tablet, Desktop
Themes
Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Research, Product Strategy, Visual Design, Accessibility
Team
PM, Dev, Design, Data Science, Client
Timeline
2020 - Present
INTRO
How might we design products for an industry that opposes change?
At ConEd, I personally led numerous projects from ideation and pitching to launch and post-launch iterations, both B2B and B2C.
The challenge here is working in an agile team, creating digital products and systems amidst an extremely traditional company culture, where every new idea will be met with heavy pessimism, and every new initiative will be under meticulous scrutiny and push-back.
Simply because “it’s how we’ve done it since the 80’s”.
GOALS
Coasting mindsets, crawling progress
In a culture where physical paper based systems are intertwined with software that was built in the 2000’s, and the comfort of keeping established systems and technologies has prevailed throughout the entirety of the company, innovation has stifled.
With new technologies emerging every year, I spearhead new initiatives that incorporated new technologies such as augmented reality, data tracking, and AI to design internal tools that finally pulls the company into the modern era, fulfilling today’s customers’ demands. Using analytics platforms such as Microsoft Clarity and various internal tools, we brought real value and real change with our products.
Pushing the envelope
The most recent product I led was Job Briefing App, where I sought to push the design, seeing an opportunity to both update our style guide and innovate on previously under-utilized functionalities.
After many rounds of pitches and conversations from stakeholders and upper management, the value of this app, especially from a safety perspective, the designs were approved!
Conversion of the physical to digital
Converting dozens of paper forms in a given process into a streamlined, guided digital format was a challenge.
The push back from user testing was heavy, but as all facets of the app was designed to comply with all 3 pillars of the company, even the most stubborn of push back could see the enormous value this provided.
Leaning into the tech
The challenge here was how can we take advantage of the digital format, how the technology can afford us both to include every single content from the physical documents, into a cohesive, yet simplified digital version.
I ended up creating a “smart” guided version that can take users to the correct “path”, taking all inputs from the user and translating those into the correct “path”.
OTHER PRODUCTS
Let the data speak for itself
Many of my previous projects here at ConEd were extremely data driven, but were previously unconnected and trends were difficult to pinpoint. My job here was to surface those trends in a easy-to-skim, digestible and intuitive manner that allows users to take these data sets and turn them into real-world, actionable solutions.
Sustainability, Innovation & Safety
My Inspection Application
This was a large scale project with the goal to improve safety of workers and for upper management to be able to track and view historical data, combining large data sets from numerous departments throughout the company to create a cohesive, one-stop-shop to manage and take action for all inspections. This was nominated for the 2023 AEIC Achievement Awards and also won the company’s Sustainability, Innovation and Safety Award for 2023.
Data, simplified
Environment, Health and Safety (EHS)
An overhaul of design to simplify the data set for the safety system of
Safety Leadership System (SLS)
Another complete redesign of the dashboard, to surface information previously unknown, and won the 2021 AEIC Achievement Award.
Enterprise solutions
Central Connect - Platform Search
Our initiative to build an enterprise level system, where we merged all of our products into a singular application that allows each individual system to read and write to each-other, while enhancing existing capabilities. All of these are tied together by the Platform Search functionality, where every single piece of content and information can be searched and every asset can be viewed, similar to Google Maps
In the face of extreme weather events
CCG
A platform built for corporate customers to be able to view and manage their power consumption for business owners, especially during extreme weathers.
EETT
An application that allows various departments and internal teams to organize, strategize, and respond during emergency weather events.
DESIGN OVERHAUL
CCL (Custom Components Library)
This was an enormous initiative that I was a part of, to redesign the entire design language and brand identity throughout all of our products, that is utilized by the rest of the company, including upper management, IT teams, and union workers, the boots on the ground.
This new library of custom components and style guides allowed us to scale in a manner that was previously too expensive or too time-consuming to build. We went from being able to build 1 product a year to 5, 6, or 7 products a year.
Below is a snippet of our newly updated style guide and components library.
DESIGNING FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES
The ability to inject a human touch to new and emerging technologies is valuable. With the rise of virtual worlds, augmented reality and the exponential rise in machine learning and AI, it is more and more apparent that technology is advancing faster than we can adapt. I firmly believe that human centric design is thus, more and more important as technology outpaces us, and my responsibility as a user centric designer is to turn these advancements into tangible, data-driven, innovative and most importantly human-centric designs.