Air Innovations manufactures Wine Guardian cooling units which are made special for wine cellars and similar applications. Wine Guardian needed an app that would allow customers to troubleshoot common product issues in order to alleviate the workload on the customer service department.

Upstate Interactive, a NY-based software engineering firm, proposed building a mobile responsive web application for customers that will enable them to input or scan their unit’s unique serial numbers (S/Ns) and obtain corresponding product information. Upstate Interactive contracted me to head up the UI/UX effort of the project.

Discovery, User Interviews, User Needs, User Stories, & UX Recommendations

After a few discovery meetings with stakeholders, we set up user interviews with customers, dealers, technicians, and customer service staff members in order to identify all of the opportunities to make this application as useful as possible. I recorded the interviews and listed out all of the design requirements that I unearthed throughout the process. I then developed a list of user needs, user stories, user personas, put everything into a document, and presented it to the stakeholders for review.

Wireframe, High-Fidelity Mockups, & Interactive Prototype

Based on the findings in the discovery process I developed a wireframe and shared it with the team and stakeholders. After receiving their feedback, I started building high-fidelity mockups and a fully interactive prototype. The application is essentially a decision tree the guides the user through the troubleshooting process.

“We have worked with Josiah a few times at Upstate Interactive because of his talent with web user experience and design. We have been impressed every time. Josiah was able to create clarity around the user experience of applications with very complicated requirements.”

- Zoe Koulouris Augustinos, Partner, Software Engineer, Upstate Interactive

Josiah holds a Certification in User Experience Design from Massachusetts Institute of Technology