Industrial Asset Vision — Sabrina Yeung

TL;DR

Background

Cisco IoT customers had no single, cohesive way to onboard, track, and manage all their devices — teams were juggling multiple tools just to get the full picture on one sensor.

Problem

Two distinct user roles emerged from research, OT and IT, with the OT role doing most of the day-to-day monitoring and troubleshooting.

Approach

Designed Asset Vision, a unified dashboard plus a companion mobile app so field technicians could onboard sensors and gateways from a remote site, no laptop required.

Outcome

Sensor and gateway onboarding dropped from days to minutes, with fewer network outages and less cost from premature equipment failure.

Days → Min

Sensor & gateway onboarding time

OT + IT

User roles unified into one dashboard

Customer segments validated via prototype testing

Understanding the initial task

Cisco IoT identified a gap in how customers managed their devices: there was no single, cohesive platform to onboard, track, and manage every device in one place. The goal was a unified experience for monitoring and tracking all of it.

"It took us three months and lots of downloading, integration and troubleshooting to get our lab LoRaWAN environment established. We don't want to open 5 applications to get all the information that is needed from a sensor."
— Philippe Daroux, Chevron Corporation

Research

I worked with a cross-functional team to understand the network and device domain, and looked at competitors in the space to see their features and limitations. Early conversations with existing customers surfaced real frustrations, which fed into assumptive personas and task lists.

Two distinct roles emerged from user interviews — OT and IT. Since OT users handled most day-to-day monitoring and troubleshooting, the bulk of the workflow was designed around their view.

From there, a user task flow mapped out exactly what each role needed to accomplish inside Asset Vision.

Design Ideation

After synthesizing the research into common trends, I mapped those insights directly into the designs.

Customer Insights

I shared an InVision prototype with customers across different market segments to get a horizontal read on the experience — 3 customers surfaced a set of common patterns that shaped the next round of design.

Key feature 01

Dashboard

The map view is the central, day-to-day monitoring surface for OT users — quickly spotting where an asset is (a warehouse, a moving vehicle), what state it's in, and whether it needs attention, with the ability to click straight into the problem.

Key feature 02

Asset Detail page

OT users rarely think in terms of a sensor ID — they think in terms of where it lives or what it's attached to. A temperature sensor matters because it tells you whether "the refrigerator" is overheating or its door was left open. Naming and pairing devices had to map to that mental model, not the hardware.

Key feature 03

Phone Application

A companion mobile app made onboarding gateways and sensors possible for field technicians working in remote locations without a laptop or reliable connectivity. Scanning a serial number to onboard a device cut error rates and sped things up considerably.

1st-time sensor onboarding flow

Impact

The mobile app was well received, cutting sensor and gateway onboarding time from days down to minutes.
Fewer network outages and less downtime, with reduced costs from premature equipment failure.

Learnings

I'd want to install and onboard the sensors myself next time, start to finish — I always had someone walking me through it, and doing it solo would've given me a very different (and probably more honest) read on the experience.
Designing for enterprise is harder than consumer work in a specific way: the scope is wider, and when you're designing across multiple verticals, a lot gets trimmed down. Not everything is a 1:1 fit.

Saving time on task for technicians in the field