Engagement Context
Appirio was a global cloud services company whose crowdsourcing platform, TopCoder, connected a community of over one million designers, developers, and data scientists with enterprise clients worldwide. Rather than staffing projects with in-house teams, Appirio used TopCoder's competitive challenge model to source and execute design and development work at scale.
My role as Creative Director and UX Architect within the TopCoder Design track sat upstream of the contributor community: I defined the design brief, established the UX framework and interaction model, directed the challenge, and evaluated submissions for inclusion in the final deliverable. Projects spanned mobile applications, enterprise dashboards, and software designed to make complex systems accessible to non-technical users.
Clients served included GE, IBM, Salesforce, and John Hancock, among others across financial services, consumer electronics, and enterprise software. The Harman / AMX engagement is detailed below.
The Problem
AMX, a Harman brand, produces integrated AV control systems for residential and commercial environments. Their AMX Living tablet application gave high-net-worth clients centralized control over whole-home AV systems — room selection, source switching, and device management — within a single interface.
The existing application did not deliver on that premise. Navigation paths were unclear, system state was poorly communicated, and the room-selection model did not reflect how users actually thought about controlling their home. For a product positioned at the premium end of the residential AV market, the experience failed to match either the sophistication of the underlying hardware or the expectations of its users.
AMX came to TopCoder to redesign the application. My role was to establish the UX direction: analyzing the existing experience, mapping the interaction model, and producing the wireframe framework that would serve as the design foundation for the engagement.
Original Application
The screens below reflect the state of the application prior to the redesign engagement.
Discovery — Scope Expands
Initial scoping positioned this as a targeted improvement pass over the existing interface. Early heuristic analysis and user flow mapping revealed the problem ran deeper: the navigation model was structurally misaligned with how users thought about their home and its systems. Patching the existing structure would have produced marginal gains at best.
The engagement became a full interaction redesign — revisiting every flow and state to build an experience appropriate to the product and its users. That scope expansion was the right call, and the discovery process justified it: the original application's issues were architectural, not cosmetic.
Process
- Heuristic and competitive analysis of the existing AMX Living application
- User flow mapping across primary use cases: room selection, source control, device management, and multi-room scenarios
- Interaction model redesign establishing a new navigation hierarchy aligned with residential mental models
- Lo-fi wireframing defining layout, state communication, and transition logic across key screens
- Wireframe deliverables submitted through TopCoder's design challenge platform for community execution
Wireframes — Redesign Direction
Reflection
The most useful decision made early in this engagement was resisting the impulse to iterate on the existing interface before understanding why it failed. The flow mapping work that exposed the structural navigation problem took time that stakeholders had not budgeted for upfront — but it prevented the team from investing design effort in the wrong direction. On a project scoped as a polish pass, that reframe is always a harder sell than the work itself.