My two years at Moxion were chaotic and challenging, spent with some of the most brilliant people I’ve worked with. The business had two areas of focus—the design and manufacture of a high-density energy storage system, and the operation of Energy Solutions, a battery delivery service meant to alleviate our reliance on diesel generators for temporary power applications.
Early on I focused on building out our core product design process, working with our front end team and later with product to establish a plan and execute. Early worked focused on style guide and design system generation to enable smooth scaling as we grew the team and coordinated with outside vendors.
One of my primary customers was the software engineering team, who were starting to build out key infrastructure for running Moxion. This included our client facing tools for requesting or monitoring reservations and our operations tools to handle all the logistics and maintenance of Energy Solutions.
Alongside this, I lead the research and design for the UI and controls of our hardware products, including the MP-75. We had extreme hardware limitations for Gen 1 that made the display a nightmare to work with, but I loved the challenge of building a functional UI on top of a static png.
Before long I’d taken on design coverage for most priority items company wide, and begun to work with leadership on key projects. I took over a struggling brand expansion exercise and was able to salvage enough of the effort to release an award winning launch site for the MP-75.
With heavy advocacy and educating, I was slowly able to build a team to address key needs of the business. I first brought on a contractor to dial in our design system and do some feature explorations. It quickly became clear we had demand, and I was able to bring on a full time senior product designer to focus solely on new Energy Solutions features.
Next we added a senior visual designer to expand my early brand guidelines and to work with our marketing and sales teams to establish processes for creating all kinds of content. We were also able to take on some really fun updates to trade dress for the later generation products.
At time of shutdown we were just cracking into the fun work of our Gen 2 platform, which removed a host of hardware constraints and opened us up to delivering a truly excellent usage experience.
I joined HelloOffice to try to bring their expert real estate services into their brand and product. At the time we were working with some of the most exciting tech companies in the bay, but we really needed to invest in how we presented ourselves to expand beyond San Francisco.
I convinced our leadership team that we were ready, and I partnered with award-winning creative agency Character to help me craft our new identity. The process began by researching our positioning within the industry before moving into explorations of our visual and verbal identity. Naming was no small part of this, and when we got legal approval to ahead with Raise we were thrilled.
From there we focused on art direction, which pulled together these elements and also added more tangible items like guidelines for photography that carry so much of their own feel. I was able to direct several limited photoshoots at some of our client’s most attractive offices, despite the major bummer of SF’s shutdowns.
The last major piece of the branding exercise was the design and development of a new marketing site, raise.work. I led this project as well, partnering with Webflow shop Finsweet to help me with some of the heaviest lifting. Much of the photography comes from our early shoots, and I produced all content.
As the branding exercise came to a close, I hired Raise’s first full-time marketing designer to help me develop the new brand. Some of my favorite items are shared here.
The core product at Raise focuses on a tool for clients to manage their current offices or to search for new space. During a search, instead of relying on stitched together listing booklet pdf's, clients are able to view available listings and collaborate in platform to choose what spaces to tour. Over time the product added features to support the entire lifecycle, and became a workplace management system integrated with a myriad of datasets and tools.
When we made the transition from HelloOffice to Raise I took advantage of the opportunity to do a full redesign of our client-facing product. Not only were we able to apply our new brand, we also implemented an updated design system and component library which brought all pages to a uniform standard and removed many artifacts of prior design treatments.
The best part of the redesign was the chance to remove some problematic foundational issues that had caused UX issues for years. Things like clunky dropdown menus and confusing filter fields were all reviewed and improved, and general architecture was revised to make wayfinding and discovery more intuitive.
All pages are fully responsive across devices, and for some features like Tours there are specialized views that give clients dynamic views based on where they are on the tour.
Most clients never organize their leases, meaning they might regularly forget to collect security deposits, or miss renewal options entirely. After failing to find a product to help our clients with these tasks, we laid out a vision for what a stripped down lease management tool might look like.
By partnering with internal domain experts, my team walked through competitor leasing tools that we’d used in the past, and got feedback for what worked well and what new features might provide the most value. From there we went into a steady rhythm of design sprints. We chose to prioritize features that would help clients avoid simple but costly mistakes, and to understand their lease agreements well enough to make smart decisions when planning.
While the UI for this feature took considerable effort to flush out, crafting the backend service offering was an effort in itself. I partnered with our Head of Broker Ops to learn all I could about the leasing process and how it impacts our clients. I then looped in our internal operations teams and external legal counsel to work out a process for collecting and reviewing client leases so that they could be entered into the system.
Ultimately we were able to create a process that automatically pulls every new lease completed by Raise directly into our client’s portal, formatted for easy review with reminders and alerts set to draw their attention to critical decision points in the future.
Freight shipments are incredibly complex processes, with many parties required to perform some function along the way.
Traditionally, shipments begin with a barrage of phone calls and emails. What comes back is never entered into any kind of system, and exists in a scatter of email threads, spreadsheets, and faxes. There is virtually zero price transparency outside of direct quote requests.
Early at Haven I partnered directly with our VP of Product and industry experts on our Operations team to move the complicated Request for Quote process into a modern platform with all the appropriate tech.
The screens here are the result of several years of closely working with our Ops team in Singapore to learn all we could about the world of freight. With each request from our clients we learned of new use cases to support, as well as how requirements change based on the item being shipped. It is a seriously long tail.
With each iteration we improved usability and streamlined the form to reduce cognitive load. Validation is as kind as possible while still offering the necessary nudge in the right direction. Because the content is so dense, we did all we could to keep the individual screens light without making the form feel excessively long.
Making the form highly adaptive based on inputs cuts the process from 10 fields down to 2 in the most optimal flow, with the standard flow being about half the total fields.
Very early at Haven I worked with our data scientist on a feature that might be able to do some future rate prediction. As part of this effort, I started putting together a basic table to search for rates and analyze possible trades. After some research, I realized there was a much more simple problem we could solve: many customers already had rates, they just didn’t have a way to store and search for them while planning shipments.
Rate management is a tremendous problem in logistics. Shippers will painfully negotiate contracted rates, but that information is never processed for use. Instead, it’s stored in massive spreadsheets with thousands of rows and no meaningful organization.
While a trade is being planned, it’s almost impossible to analyze the cost of freight, even though it’s the biggest factor in determining profit or loss. This basic interface turned out to be a huge value for clients that shipped primarily with contracted rates.
The feature was developed across several iterations to support additional shipment types. After some thorough exploration of what rate components affect pricing, I settled on the most simple search that could quickly deliver all possible routing and pricing options. Once selected, shippers can click to instantly book or restart the process to investigate a different trade option.
