CARRIER FLEET
Delivering a digital foundation to reinvent a building technology leader for a smart and sustainable future
IA Collaborative
Project Lead & Design Director
IA Collaborative
Project Lead & Design Director
CHALLENGE
Build a universal digital design system to speed development of new digital services across Carrier’s complex portfolio of solutions technologies
As Carrier builds a new data cloud (Carrier IO) to double its $30B business around smart and sustainable building, cities, and cold chain, our team was tasked to deliver a design system-as-service to accelerate new product development. With MVP launches already in the pipeline for services across Carrier business units, our team organized a series of sprints to build the design system like a snowball. After setting some baseline heuristic and interaction principles that would differentiate Carrier’s digital products, we bypassed static comps and mockups and went straight to prototyping four distinct digital products to test the design system and gain coverage quickly. Our atomic approach allowed each prototype to build on previous decisions which streamlined customer validation. Working directly with engineers and product designers we shipped new components and design guidelines as part of each sprint, and eliminated the need to backtrack and update previous builds.
Build a universal digital design system to speed development of new digital services across Carrier’s complex portfolio of solutions technologies
As Carrier builds a new data cloud (Carrier IO) to double its $30B business around smart and sustainable building, cities, and cold chain, our team was tasked to deliver a design system-as-service to accelerate new product development. With MVP launches already in the pipeline for services across Carrier business units, our team organized a series of sprints to build the design system like a snowball. After setting some baseline heuristic and interaction principles that would differentiate Carrier’s digital products, we bypassed static comps and mockups and went straight to prototyping four distinct digital products to test the design system and gain coverage quickly. Our atomic approach allowed each prototype to build on previous decisions which streamlined customer validation. Working directly with engineers and product designers we shipped new components and design guidelines as part of each sprint, and eliminated the need to backtrack and update previous builds.
OUTCOME
Fleet is already in-market︎︎︎ and product teams at Carrier are serving Fleet directly from Carrier IO to launch new products and evolve Carrier into a design-led smart building tech leader. Our integrated, cross-functional approach to building Fleet enabled meaningful initial results:
Fleet is already in-market︎︎︎ and product teams at Carrier are serving Fleet directly from Carrier IO to launch new products and evolve Carrier into a design-led smart building tech leader. Our integrated, cross-functional approach to building Fleet enabled meaningful initial results:
- Shipped in less than five months with launch of Abound, a net-new healthy buildings platform powering $13B opportunity
- Technical architecture of Fleet (design system as-service) reduced time for engineers to commit code from weeks to days
- Scalability: Lynx, a global cold chain solution developed in partnership with Amazon AWS, is built on Fleet information architecture and when it launches in 2022 will help eliminate enough food waste to feed 950M people
- Training: Enhanced Carrier’s digital innovation capability by onboarding new Carrier product team members and engineers using prototypes
- Governance: Atomic approach means engineers can update code base as needs evolve without undertaking redesigns
▴ Design system as a service
(L) Fleet enables rapid devlopment of MVPs by being centrally served through Carrier IO
(R) Fleet defines scalable principles and patterns that unify UX across the portfolio and support any data served from Carrier IO
(R) Fleet defines scalable principles and patterns that unify UX across the portfolio and support any data served from Carrier IO
▴ Components for customization
Fleet's highly modular component library has flexibility built-in for everyone—
devs can "drag and drop" elements, while users can rearrange them to prioritize what's front and center.
devs can "drag and drop" elements, while users can rearrange them to prioritize what's front and center.
▴ Prototype to build
To ensure coverage and depth, we built Fleet through a series of product prototype sprints.
Each product sprint extended previous sprints, and leveraged already-codified elements.
Check-ins with engineers along the way made hand-off simple, without massive code updates.
Each product sprint extended previous sprints, and leveraged already-codified elements.
Check-ins with engineers along the way made hand-off simple, without massive code updates.
▴ Fleet unlocks growth where Carrier never expected to find it