With Edison, community members can better determine the correct precaution to take in a given moment through personalized messaging and seeing their location in relation to the event. Meanwhile, safety teams can detect and respond to events quicker via community reporting and remote detection .

See Edison in Action

Designing for Interpretation & Action

From corporate and school campuses, to entire cities, Edison was built to be deployed in a variety of environments. Teams can take the base platform and build upon it to address the more unique needs of their individual community.

As a result, several themes kept coming up around designing for the Safety Administrators and their control center.  After several workshops, we articulated these themes as our core design challenges for this part of the platform:

• How do we help Safety Administrators understand the influx of raw data so that they can quickly understand where their attention may be needed, while keeping the power and responsibility of assigning meaning to that data in their hands? 
  
  
• How do we ensure devices that are pinging the system with a higher frequency don't drown out others that may be less frequent but potentially more important?
  
  
• How can we minimize the time it takes to send information to community members and first responders, thereby getting people to safety sooner?

To start, we built a home base of the Admin Control center that features three main pieces. 

1) A fully interactive map that gives a birds-eye view of all the devices and their activity status wtihin the defined geography. 

2) An Event Feed flanking the map that summarizes key information about events and updates in real-time.  It is a critical feature because it actively draws attention to an event whether or not it is within view on the map. 

3) Activate Response buttons (and a keyboard shortcut) placed at the app-level and card-levels for swift action.

Handling the Squeeky Wheel

We had to be careful to not allow a device activating multiple times to visually overwhelm others that have activated only once. For example, a sound sensor could be picking up repetitive church bells at the same time a person sends a single distress message from their app.

As a result, we didn't use colors like red or orange to communicate activity. Instead we created the concept of Event Frequency, which establishes that a single instance of a personal status message from a community member, a button press, or sound sensor activation results in a '1x' appearing on the map pin and the respective Event Feed card. When another instance occurs from the same source, it increases +1 , and the card is refreshed and placed the top of the feed again.

Event Frequency allows for a calmer interface with the usage of blue for any activity where a response has not been not activated. Map pins only turn a more urgent color when the admin activates responses classified as urgent or a person calls for emergency help.

The Moment of Action

Our vision was to enable safety administrators to launch a set of communication actions as quickly as possible. To help achieve this, we created the framework of Action Plans and Action Items. 

During setup, the team creates custom Action Plans for a range of potential events, such as "Fire", or "Air Quality". 

Each plan is then assigned individual Action Items in advance. Action Items are specific tasks to be completed. They can range from automatically dialing 911, sending mobile app notifications, to turning LED lights red in the area to communicate danger.

With this structure in place, the admin can spring an orchestrated communication sequence into action within seconds.

Once a response is activated, the prominent event counter changes to reflect the color of the highest priority response in progress, while the 'Manage Responses' component allows for ongoing updates.

A geographic radius is established around the device or person that set the response in motion. If other sensors within that radius activate, they can be automatically affiliated with the ongoing response if desired. This helps the admin visualize how an event might be moving. 

Designing for Personal Safety

Our mission was to provide Community Members a trustworthy tool they can use to call for help, report activity, and get personally relevant information about events that could affect them. 

As a Community Member, you will use it in moments where your adrenaline is pumping, dexterity is hindered, or perhaps even when you're hiding from a threat.

To be mindful of that context, we considered how we could use the hardware and OS to allow for a range of different interaction inputs while minimizing the steps to complete them . For example, 3D touch as seen above allows for meaningful communication without having to open the app.

We considered situations where emitting light could give away your location. In that case, you can dim the your device brightness right on the home screen.

Unlike the Security Administrators who must concern themselves with the chatter of the IoT platform, you only care about truly meaningful events. As a result, info cards appear only when an alert has been activated.

With a single tap, or even by shaking the phone, you can alert authorities of an emergency.  For events that ask for it, you can indicate your safety status just as easily.

Tap 'more info' on the alert card to see the full alert timeline and a larger map to get a closer look at your proximity to the event. Using your device location, we tell you if you're too close for comfort. The pointer on your map pin uses the compass to help get you pointed in the direction of safety.

The bottom sheet shrinks, but persists across all areas of the app to allow for immediate access to the most important actions.

By now you should have an awareness of whether you're in immediate danger, or if there's just some annoying thing happening on the other side of campus today you want to avoid. But, people get anxious and sometimes being able to ask a direct question makes you feel a heck of a lot better. 

For this reason, you can directly message your Safety Administrators and do just that.  If you can't compose a message, just tap one of the activity icons to report what's happening and share your location.

As seen here, if you happen to report an emergency via the bottom sheet, the app will immediately open messaging so that a direct line of communication is established.

Edison had to be ready for Microsoft's first IoT in Action event of the year in Barcelona, which required that we build a stge demonstration that was both effective and able to be carried onto a plane for the full 10-city international tour. 

The product itself also had to be publicly released by that same date. Achieving this required the work of a talented team of designers, developers, architects, and solution specialists. In just a few months, we designed, built, tested, and shipped version 1.

Throughout the early stages, I moved back and forth between digital whiteboarding with the distributed Microsoft team to define the product direction, and my sketchbook to rapidly iterate on different design patterns. 

We then moved quickly into high fidelity comps, where I paired with a talented visual designer to define the visual language that met our functional and branding objectives.

Early sketches for the Admin Control Center exploring how to display live events. 

Envisioning the UI layout and core functionality of the Consumer App. 

Outcome & Reflection

We completed the first release of the product just in time for its moment to shine on the IoT in Action stage in Barcelona. During the presentation, it was announced that Project Edision was available immediately on GitHub.  

Today, the team is continuing to release new versions, and even a third app that takes care of IoT device setup. I've also been working on building out documentation that captures the framework behind Event Frequency, Action Plans & Items, and other concepts such as Event Cooldown. 

Working with the button and the sound sensor, which at this point result in no more than boolean output, proved to be an interesting challenge. For example, the sound sensor lacks any AI behind it that would be capable of discerning between the loud noise of a car crash vs. a group of people bursting into laughter.  Pairing this with the fact that Edison is meant to be expanded upon by anyone, I had to design with a much more hypothetical frame of future usage in mind. This made the design process more abstract than it would if we were implementing it for a specific organization. I enjoyed this characteristic of the product the most, as the challenge was as much about designing for safety as it was more broadly building a stage for other creators to stand on.