Background
Cortex is tackling climate change by equipping office building owners with actionable energy insights that drive smarter, more sustainable operations. The UX objective was to deeply understand building engineers—their workflows, challenges, and goals—in order to design tools that help them operate buildings more efficiently and effectively.
My Role
As the lead UX designer, I led the design of the Cortex carbon reduction platform, which helped buildings eliminate 23,000 metric tons of CO₂e annually. Working within a small agile team, I wore multiple hats—conducting user research, shaping interaction design, and building prototypes. I also drove process improvements and partnered closely with product management to define requirements, prioritize features, and align the team around user and business goals.
Research and user feedback
I conducted ongoing user research with surveys, site visits, and interviews to understand users, building operations and their impact on efficiency and carbon footprint. Users revealed that portfolio managers and building operation teams have different goals and don’t communicate effectively.
Understanding and defining the users
What started as a very simple app for a single user grew over time. User personas were developed in collaboration with the Cortex team to help all internal stakeholders understand the goals, motivations and challenges of our end users. Developing a a visual heir achy and a set of user personas was critical to getting the entire team aligned about our users.
Key to the evolution of the product and driving user-centric problems solving for end users was the realization from research that two very distinct user groups existed.
One focused on the day-to-day operations of individual buildings.
The other focused on how a portfolio of buildings perform as investment.
My work was crucial in defining the user personas, which helped the team align on the goals, motivations, and challenges of our end users
Understanding users drove product evolution
Regular testing and user feedback sessions helped identify core objectives that became essential features. User personas helped us focus on sets of features that addressed real user needs. A clear separation of goals and motivations emerged from ongoing site-visits and discussions with various users of the dashboard and tools. What initially was seen as simply a tool for saving energy at a building evolved into two major user communities with clearly different perspectives on how to use the application.
Engineers are
Non-tech savvy, overworked and challenged with antiquated systems.Often doesn’t understand the savings goals of portfolio management. Wants easy-to-use tools to keep tenants happy while saving energy each day.
Engineers wants to know
When do I start up my building today?
How long do I keep systems running to maintain tenant comfort?
How do I avoid management criticism for doing their best to make the building efficient?
Management teams are
Responsible for the investments.
Cannot see the operational complexities of each building or understand the results of investments in energy efficiency made in each building.
Want to know
To understand if investments are effective across their entire portfolio.
This resulted in Cortex Energy Reporting as a standalone product.
Design considerations
Guiding principles
Solutions
Results
It makes my job easier by providing start times, which saves money for ownership, and gives us the information and the tools needed to make educated decisions on a daily basis.
- Chief Building Engineer
“There's nothing I dislike about Cortex. Its simple. Easy to use and I need to adjust my world to use it more often. It's great and it works."
– A New York building engineer
