Casey Drummond
All work
Case study 03 · Consolidation · Design systems · Cross-platform

Unifying a fragmented product journey

Five siloed city-infrastructure apps forced operations teams to sign in across five systems. Inside an autonomous core unit, I architected one multi-tenant IoT platform that merged isolated data streams into a single, responsive hub.

Role
Product Designer / UX Marketing Manager
Interface architecture & testing
Company
Taoglas
Smart-city IoT platform
Users
City, fleet, finance & sustainability
managers; waste collectors
Tools
Figma, Zeplin
Confluence, Jira
Confidentiality notice: Logos, product names and identifying details in these visuals have been obscured, consistent with my confidentiality obligations. Sample data shown is fictional.
Unified city-operations platform in production
5 → 1Separate city-operations apps merged into one platform
5 teamsCity, fleet, finance, sustainability and waste teams agreed on one shared structure
1 → 4UX maturity on Nielsen Norman Group’s 6-stage model: from “Absent” to “Structured”
01 · Research

Five teams, one body of evidence

I interviewed product teams and end users of all five apps and studied the IoT landscape and legacy systems.

01
One destination
Users needed a single platform to replace five disparate apps.
02
Cost & routing first
Cost savings and fleet-routing optimization were top priorities.
03
Customizable dashboards
Every operations team needed role-based, configurable views.
How I think

When five teams each own a piece of the truth, I make the whole system visible first. Then I design the screens.

02 · How I worked

From whiteboard to one platform

Each step answers a question the previous one raised. Here’s what I did, why I chose it, and what it changed.

Whiteboard wireframe of the ERP home page drawn during the design summit
Step 01

I got five teams in one room

What I did

Led a design-thinking summit with product owners, SMEs and developers, and whiteboarded the ERP home together.

Why this step

Five teams had never seen each other’s workflows side by side. Alignment had to come before any screen.

What it changed

A shared list of what every team needed on day one: devices, users, zones and dashboards.

Step 02

I put five apps on one map

What I did

Mapped the structure of all five apps into a single draft sitemap.

Why this step

Overlaps and duplicates only become obvious when everything sits on one page.

What it changed

One harmonized information architecture replaced five separate navigation models.

Draft sitemap merging the structures of five IoT apps into one
Early grey dashboard concept with device reading tiles
Step 03

I shipped a first dashboard to learn from

What I did

Designed an early dashboard concept with device tiles and key readings.

Why this step

A concrete draft gets sharper feedback than a description. I wanted teams to react to something real.

What it changed

Engineering, product and marketing feedback sharpened icon labels and iconography and showed which UI the next version needed, like larger data visualizations.

Step 04

I explored navigation before committing

What I did

Designed navigation variants for device management and the admin panel.

Why this step

One menu had to serve five roles without turning into five menus. Comparing variants side by side made the tradeoffs visible.

What it changed

The chosen direction added larger, glanceable data visualizations, tables for essential data, and a calendar widget for quick date changes.

Device management navigation variantAdmin panel navigation variant
Final unified city-operations platform
Step 05

I validated every iteration with the people who’d use it

What I did

Moved lo-fi to hi-fi in Figma, reviewing each round with product owners, SMEs and engineers.

Why this step

With five audiences, a design that pleased one team could quietly break another. Frequent reviews caught that early.

What it changed

Role-based, real-time dashboards, from fleet routing and cost tracking to crowd analytics.

A dead end I learned from

Designing without full system access

Some systems were too abstract to map, and access to others was restricted for good reason. So we gathered the essential UI and information we could, and studied competitors’ systems to learn what users would expect, so the design landed on the first try.

03 · Key decision

From five device lists to one management view

The problemFive apps meant five device inventories, five status views and five sign-ins, with no shared operational truth.
My decisionConsolidate device management into one multi-tenant hub: uptime, statuses, alerts and role-based configuration for five operations teams.
Before · five separate apps
Fleet Ops
Waste Ops
Finance
Sustainability
City Ops
After · one management view
Unified operations hubOne sign-in · role-based views
UptimeDevice statusAlertsRole-based configFleet routingCost tracking
04 · Outcome

One destination for every operations team

One destinationEvery operations team now starts, and stays, in a single platform.
Same-day insightNew monitoring zones go live remotely: no site visits, no new software.
Lasting design cultureThe research frameworks and UX process I embedded outlived the launch.

During COVID-19, the platform’s CROWD Insights™ analytics was offered free of charge to a leading Irish hospital, and at cost to other health systems.