What is PVT (Performance Verification Tool)?
Johnson Controls’ Performance Verification Tool, or PVT, is a software solution designed to assess and validate the performance of building systems and controls. Essentially, it ensures that the systems responsible for managing and optimizing various aspects of a building’s environment are functioning as intended.
The tool likely works by interfacing with the building’s control systems, which could include heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, and other systems. It may perform a range of tests and analyses to evaluate the efficiency, accuracy, and overall effectiveness of these systems. This could involve assessing temperature control, energy consumption, and the responsiveness of the building’s systems to different conditions.
The Problem
There were several “problems” that needed to be solved when deciding how a user would access certain functionalities. A lot of data is constantly being displayed so there needed to be a simple approach for each solution to make it easy to get to.
Some of these features included how to show notifications, both on the dashboard when you enter PVT. Designing how to show preferences, how to merge site settings together, how to resolve issues pertaining to existing sites were all problems that needed to be addressed.
My Role
The basic framework for the webapp was already created when I first started at Johnson Controls. I was assigned to take over, as the Principal UX Designer moved onto a new project. My job was to create a cohesive user experience that included an easy-to-follow flow of site functionalities, such as scanning, merging, reporting assessments, displaying important notifications and much more.
The Goal
Create a cohesive user experience that includes an easy to follow flow of site functionalities, such as scanning sites, merging sites, reporting assessments, receiving notifications, and much more. This also depended on the type of user that as logged in, as certain features may or may not be available to certain users.
Designing the App
Luckily, I had the framework of the dashboard to work off of. Even with a design system in place, I needed to create numerous components that were not there already to make the features simple to use, and at the same time, visually cohesive with the rest of the product. This included a tabular table of different preferences of points, equipment types and rules for the technicians.
Notifications
The notifications screen shows the criticality of the alert, from informative to warning to severe. They can be filtered by date, priority and by site name.
Preferences
The preferences pane is what technicians use to change the patterns, instance numbers, units of measure and object type of a site, and are categorized by global, site and country values.
Dashboard
This screen is the site dashboard, and shows the scans that took place during different periods of time, while also indicating their status.
Takeaways
Over the year and a half I spent on the project, I was involved with daily scrums with the team as well as one-on-ones with the developers to make sure that they implemented the visual components correctly, and then periodic meetings with the product owner and architect. Several different types of users used PVT, and depending what type of user they were, certain features were either shown or hidden.
This project was extremely intimidating at first because I had absolutely no idea what was being taught to me, as I didn’t understand the lingo and the numerous acronyms they were constantly using.