Device and device type management

Added devices — dubbed “things” on the platform — are listed on the Things page, together with their status, tags, groups, and events, all visible at a glance. To facilitate adding new devices, the platform supports Thing Types. These templates allow for defining a set of characteristics that every new device of this type will inherit.

Every device type also has a separate view with all of its details. These include general information (e.g., name, ID, provider), characteristics, and the groups it belongs to. In the map view, users can also review devices based on their locations.

Templates for adding devices at scale and a comprehensive at-a-glance overview of all connected devices facilitated device management, securing a task success rate of 87%. Our layout and navigation optimizations also contributed to a smooth user experience, leading to a CSAT exceeding the industry benchmark.

Device details and dashboards

Users can create and customize as many dashboards as they need for all listed devices, devices in a certain group, or individual devices. The dashboards can include both the latest readings or alerts and historical data and trends.

Data visualizations are completely under the user’s control. Users can add widgets from pre-built templates or create their own data visualizations. The layout is also fully customizable: widgets can be placed and organized as the user sees fit.

The well-rounded dashboard customization capabilities, along with an intuitive dashboard builder and organizer, enable users to quickly grasp the captured data, identify trends, and see arising issues. These personalization and data visualization features helped secure a CSAT of 81, achieve annual user growth of 78%, and drive engagement metrics up by 21%.

Custom widgets

While users can easily add run-of-the-mill charts and graphs to visualize captured data and its trends, the platform also enables them to create custom widgets. These widgets give users the freedom to track the metrics and trends based on their unique needs.

User widgets support custom timeframes and bucket sizes, measures, aggregation methods (average/minimum/maximum/ etc.), and colors.

The ability to create custom widgets makes the platform more versatile in the matters of data analysis and monitoring. This proved to be a value-adding feature as it was frequently cited in positive user feedback during the CSAT assessments.

Telemetry for advanced data analysis

This section lets users create custom queries to compare two devices’ data or view charts in more detail. The user flow for creating a query is the same as for a custom widget, making the user experience more consistent and the learning curve gentler.

In line with our iterative approach to design, we moved through several versions of the Telemetry user flows. Thanks to our gradual refinement of the user experience, the time spent on tasks declined by 31% between the first and final versions of the interface.

User management and role-based permissions

To enable whole teams to manage devices within a business, we designed a comprehensive user management feature set.

Users can be added to groups that determine which devices the selected users have access to. Administrations can manage user permissions (Read, Update, Execute) for each individual user and create roles with specific permissions and access to resources.

This role-based access, optimized for a smooth user experience, mitigates security risks and protects sensitive data from unauthorized access or modification.

Notifications and search

In accordance with our client’s requirements, we implemented real-time notifications. Alerts are automatically sorted into categories based on subject. Users can filter notifications by category (e.g., User, Device, Needs Action).

Thanks to these timely alerts, users can easily stay on top of all changes in device state or user status — and promptly resolve issues as soon as they become known. The intuitive notification filtering also improved user satisfaction and engagement while reducing the time on task.

To facilitate data retrieval across the platform’s components, we also added advanced search across users, devices, device types, groups, and more. Users can search device details using the search bar at the top of any screen, as well.

This robust search feature also helped increase user satisfaction and task success rates.

Responsive design optimized for performance

Based on our client’s requirements, we settled on using React to turn the approved prototype into a fully functioning interface. This ensured that the SaaS platform is properly rendered and easy to use on screens of any size, from UltraHD desktop screens to mobile devices.

Our tech stack, along with performance optimizations, ensured that the platform remains fast and responsive even under high workloads. Our efforts brought the response time under 0.5 seconds and limited latency to <50ms, making loading almost imperceptible to the human eye.

Real-time data refreshing

The device management system was meant to supply users with real-time data captured from connected devices with minimum latency. To ensure that timely data refreshing didn’t undermine the application’s performance or user experience, we implemented multiple optimizations. Those included caching, error handling, and scalability optimizations.

Thanks to our efforts, the data is continuously updated in real time with a minimum lag and zero friction to the user experience. Our performance optimizations also brought down the response time and latency.