I led research and discovery, design direction, and strategic vision for Utelogy’s next-generation energy and resource management platform, enabling a scalable architecture, powering AI integration, cloud-centric workflows, and digital twin capabilities. The platform offers device-agnostic control, advanced analytics, and role-based visibility, providing targeted and actionable data-driven insights that enable organizations to manage their energy footprint and reduce costs.

Timeframe: Jan ’23 – Nov ‘24

Team: Senior UX Designer (Me), CTO, CPO, 2PMs, 4x Engineers

My work: Research, Design system, 0-1 innovation, ML/AI-enhanced UX Design, Digital Twin technology

SITUATION:

Utelogy provided a suite of software solutions for managing audiovisual (AV) systems across enterprise, education, government, and managed service provider (MSP) environments. The product portfolio included:

• U-Manage – a cloud-based platform for centralized management, monitoring, and analytics (including U-Automate, U-Scheduling, Tech Tool, U-Analytics, and U-Control).

• U-Enterprise – an on-premise system for AV control (including U-Server, U-Control, U-Computer, and U-Console).

Over the last 10-12 years, the suite expanded in scope and complexity, with onboarding, training, and daily management requiring significant support from Utelogy teams. Users frequently context-switched between multiple separate applications, often copying data between systems to complete workflows, which slowed productivity and created friction in daily operations.

PROCESS:

I partnered closely with the CTO, CPO and support team for nearly two years, building trust and alignment with teams through cross-functional user research initiatives, data-driven design, workshops, leadership reviews, and UX office hours.

UX research and discovery methods included baseline onboarding research, onboarding audit, support team research, stakeholder research, and sustained use research. These studies were synthesized to detail user experience journeys and common points of friction for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and AV organizational leaders.

I synthesized and shared research insights across teams to build a shared understanding of user journeys, intentions, and goals, enabling cross-functional alignment on the UX outcome (ideal user experience) and its success metrics and progress indicators to achieve it. These collaborations operationalized the research, fostered user-centered alignment, and directly informed the product roadmap.

User research enabled data-driven design to guide two key initiatives:

• Current platform refinement: improving scalability, consistency, and usability while reducing design and technical debt.

• Future product vision: defining the long-term strategic direction and technical innovation.

This dual-track approach delivered immediate short-term feature enhancements and usability improvements in product for existing customers and established a scalable, customer-centric foundation that advanced Utelogy’s long-term strategic goals.

Additional design processes:

• I created an iterative design direction through proof-of-concepts and fully functional prototypes, enabling visibility, feedback, and design vision solidification.

• I led iterative design system creation, management, socialization, and documentation.

OUTCOME:

I designed an end-to-end platform that unified Utelogy’s resource management tools into a single, scalable interface, dramatically improving efficiency, accessibility, and organizational oversight. Supported by a comprehensive design system, the platform standardized on modern usability patterns, enabled consistency across Utelogy user experiences, reduced design, engineering, and support team debt, and implementation overhead, while providing both a light and a dark theme for users to choose from.

The cloud-based experience introduced single sign-on and a more intuitive, seamless account creation and onboarding flow, enabling users to establish organizational structures through intuitive workflows, lowering the barrier to entry and teaching structure through everyday use. Together, these advancements elevated visibility, usability and engagement, enabled easier customer adoption, and positioned the platform for long-term growth and scalability.

The new product experience introduced a layered information model with dashboards that:

• provided instant high-level clarity

• intelligent role-based alerting perspectives

• clear call-to-action affordances to drill into specific events

• clear systemized navigational structure that lowered cognitive load

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and enterprise customers reported reduced cognitive load, less context switching, and greater clarity across organizational management workflows. University IT leaders found onboarding less resource-intensive, while all users demonstrated higher engagement, faster learning, and excitement from increased confidence through consistent patterns, ease of use, and predictable behavior across the platform.

The redesigned experience delivered an organizational structure with functionality hubs to manage assets, configurations, automations, and workflows, surfacing role-based, action-oriented visibility for critical issues through the dashboard. This eliminated the need to monitor multiple tools and touchpoints across the organization, driving significant operational efficiency and measurable cost savings.

Initial research indicated that users were able to navigate this process with no training required, highly appreciated the streamlined experience, found it intuitive, and were interested and engaged in learning how to manage their AV systems and organizational footprint with greater trust and understanding.

In validation testing with functional content and high-fidelity prototypes, users easily discovered main features through the left-side menu, accessing additional functionality, and used dashboards to drill into detailed user specific data. The platform surfaced tailored content through role-based interaction patterns driven by user permissions.

Overall impact

The redesigned experience delivered:

• Intelligent alerting and enhanced automation for proactive system management.

• Self-healing capabilities that reduced downtime and maintenance overhead.

• Actionable, real-time data visualizations with drill-down functionality for deeper insight.

• Comprehensive visibility and alerting across all organizational tiers, resources, and geographies.

• A unified design language that connected all Utelogy resource management tools through consistent patterns and workflows—supporting intuitive onboarding, sustained usability, and long-term adoption.

This redesign enhanced onboarding efficiency, improved ease of use, and facilitated continuous learning, while advancing product innovation, informing strategic investments, and aligning the user experience with Utelogy’s long-term business vision.