2019 - 2022 Simvisr Project
The Edify Safety Platform
Tldr: Edify Safety (now Safety Mojo) was a mobile and web app that digitized job site forms for large-scale construction projects with clients like Meta and Mortenson Construction. It would take the data collected and use AI to find actionable insights customers could use to prevent incidents before they happened.Â
Edify’s clients saw major reductions in safety incidents and were even able to use it to get lower insurance premiums.
I worked for Simvisr, the dev shop that had the contract for Edify, as the only in-house designer. My role was maintaining and implementing the Edify design system for new features or rebranding the app for new customers. It was a foundational project for my career, which is why it’s here in my portfolio.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Mostly production and forms
Timeline
3 Years
Broken into lean/agile sprints
Team
Cross-Functional
I was the only designer
Result
50% Less Accidents
Based on long-term trends
The Problem
The construction industry used paper forms that had to be processed manually, causing repeat accidents and increased liability.
At the time Edify was developed, most of the construction industry was still heavily reliant on paper forms such as pre-task plans, incident reports, and hazard assessments. They were trying to create a culture of safety, but their solution was slowing down productivity because they required workers to fill out forms by hand and then turn them in at physical locations. Time was being spent on paperwork despite tight construction project timelines, which was causing increased frustration and stress.
Even worse, the forms were usually transcribed into spreadsheets where data sat unused because the companies simply didn’t have the tools to parce all the information they were collecting. As a result, what should have been a tool to get workers to stop and take a minute to think things through was just becoming busy work that often had very little to do with actual safety risks.
That’s where Edify came in.
.
The Solution
An Android/iOS app that could be backed with AI to mine for insights, client branded, and managed in a desktop portal.
Edify’s goal was to be the first app to digitize these forms and integrate AI for data analysis, giving their customers actionable insights using their unique safety trends. The granular and high-level views of safety patterns were collected via the user app, then processed and made available to client management via a dashboard.
It was a very flexible system that could be used for construction but also trucking companies, oil rigs, or anywhere else where safety is a major consideration. When I joined, Edify was still in MVP but in the process of scaling. This meant they needed an in-house designer dedicated to digitizing new customer forms and applying branding to the existing design system. That’s where I came in.
Digitize forms and add conditional logic
Brand the individual environments
Build a proprietary AI to mine insights
Deliver a customized app version with each client's branding
The Research
Preliminary research was conducted during the MVP phase, and then feedback was collected from users during site visits.
MVP Research
Edify's CEO had secured partner clients for the MVP, allowing him to research and develop in-tandem.
This turned out to be an excellent process for Edify’s development because the app grew as the understanding of the problem grew. There were key usability problems caused by the lack of professional UX guidance, but the end product still improved safety for the partner clients’ job sites, saving them time and money. Â
User Feedback
Edify's leadership would periodically conduct site visits, and interview users and other stakeholders.
One of the key ways Edify evolved was through user feedback. The CEO (small startup) would go to the job sites using Edify and ask the users directly what was causing them problems and what features would be helpful for them. He would then bring that feedback to us, the small startup dev shop that he partnered with.
This process was a good and a bad thing. We almost always had new user feedback we could use to make improvements, but it was detrimental to finishing sprints because he would want to make changes before the last set of changes were complete. It turned into a sort of feedback loop and by the end is likely what caused the project’s collapse. Â
The Design System
The design system was created before my tenure, so I was in charge of maintaining it and implementing it for new features.
Edify’s branding was full of bold colors, graphic elements, and rounded elements that gave it a retro vibe. The app played on this and used a lot of fully-rounded fields and buttons within a material design framework.
However, because Edify was a SaaS, part of the service it offered was skinning the app with the branding of the customer. This meant we built base pages using Edify’s design, but the screens that reached the users were completely customized for them. Â
As the in-house designer, my job was to take the client’s brand and apply it to the app according to their style guides if they had them or based on research of their marketing materials. Edify’s CEO and CTO preferred I maintain as much of the base Edify style as possible to save on dev time, so I quickly learned how to walk a very fine line between customer needs and the needs of my employer. It was great practice for me but not ideal from a business perspective.
The Forms
My main job was translating paper forms into digital versions, then applying the design system and/or customer branding.
The bulk of my time at Simvisr/Edify was spent translating physical forms into digital versions. This was a job that was originally done by Edify’s CEO, but I turned out to have a knack for applying conditional logic and building forms that streamlined the user experience, so the task was handed to me. I really loved this aspect of my job; the problem-solving and branching user flows were so satisfying to construct, and each form I built had the potential to actually save someone’s life. This was the first time I had a taste of building a true user experience, and it is definitely where my love for the process comes from.Â
My process started when I was handed a new form, usually just a scanned copy of whatever they were using in the field. I would dissect it and figure out what parts relied on other parts and construct the flow from there.
Once I had a decent understanding of the form and a plan for the elements I would need, I moved to Balsamiq and built the wireframe. That wireframe would be reviewed by Edify’s CEO and CTO for tech feasibility and then be sent to the customer contact for approval. Any changes needed were made, then I would move to Adobe XD to build the high-fidelity design and prototype.Â
The finished prototype link would again make the stakeholder rounds, changes needed would be made, then the form would be packaged and sent off to the dev team and I would start on the next form.Â
The Outcome
Edify improved safety metrics, lowered insurance costs, and likely saved the lives of several workers.
During Edify’s peak, it was a force to be reckoned with. The customers were happy with their app versions, and Edify was on track to reach unicorn status. It was actively saving user lives and limbs (hard to quantify, but after implementing the app, no fatal accidents happened, and Edify’s CEO was told it had likely saved users during several near-miss incidents), and insurance costs were down as a result.Â
Edify’s Achilles heel was scaling up. As the platform grew, the technical debt grew because the “move fast and break stuff” attitude only works when you take time every once in a while to fix the stuff you break. By the end, the core of the platform was almost entirely spaghetti code, but no one was willing to spend the time and resources needed to rebuild the system, which was what needed to happen.Â
Edify moved on to acquire a more straightforward form builder system that wasn’t backed by AI and swapped users over to that while Simvisr collapsed without its star client. It was an outcome that could have been avoided with better project management, but hindsight is 20/20.
If I were further along in my career I might have been able to step in and learn that role, but I just didn’t know enough at the time. I moved on to another startup and eventually to a formal education in UX, but I’ll always wonder if I could have done things differently and saved Edify.Â
%
Reduction in Accidents
Based on client feedback and metrics
Return on Investment
Within two years via insurance savings
%
Average Cost Savings
Compared to paper-based processes
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