Defining the compliance layer for an industrial AI safety monitoring platform.
Real-time monitoring dashboards mean nothing if the system can't survive an audit. I ran field research to define what compliance-ready actually looked like.
My research findings led to a strategic decision to discontinue the product.
ROLE
UX Research & Strategy
TIMELINE
4 months
2021
TEAM
6 people
SCOPE
MVP Prototype
DOMAIN
Enterprise SaaS
TOOLS
Figma
PROJECT OVERVIEW
A Safety Platform Built at Pandemic Speed
Alarta was an AI-powered COVID-19 safety and compliance platform, aimed to help facilities resume safe operations during the pandemic.
The platform offered five integrated modules: temperature screening with AI-driven thermal cameras, mask detection, UVC disinfection automation, manual cleaning management, and contact tracing. It targeted facility managers across hospitality, transportation, healthcare, retail, education, and entertainment — essentially any industry managing physical spaces with foot traffic.
Target Industries
- Hospitality and Tourism - Transportation - Healthcare - Education - Retail and Commercial - Entertainment and Sports
Five Integrated Modules
- Temperature screening with AI-driven thermal cameras - Mask detection - UVC disinfection automation - Manual cleaning management - Contact tracing
Brutal Competitive Landscape
Dozens of COVID safety solutions had emerged, from simple cleaning checklists to enterprise facility management platforms, all vying for the same anxious market.
THE PROBLEM
Demos Without Conversion
The team had been interpreting this as a messaging problem — potential customers just didn't understand the product well enough.
The platform had capabilities - thermal cameras could screen up to 30 people simultaneously with 95% accuracy, and the QR-code-based cleaning verification system was well-designed. But something fundamental wasn't connecting. My initial brief was to sharpen the value proposition and improve the demo experience. That assumption didn't survive first contact with actual facility managers.
MY ROLE AND SCOPE
Hired for Discovery. Saw Something Bigger.
I was brought on to define the strategy to unlock subscriber growth. I expanded my scope significantly beyond what was asked.
The team expected me to validate or refine the existing value proposition — automation of screening and cleaning processes. Instead, my initial discovery work revealed something the team hadn't seen — businesses weren't ready to invest in simple automation.
Before pivoting the research direction, I presented my early findings to the team — the pattern from initial facility manager conversations was too consistent to ignore. The team agreed to expand the research scope before committing to any design work.
DISCOVERY
The Signal Nobody Was Hearing
Alarta was designed as an operations tool — automate and track cleaning. But facility managers needed a compliance tool — prove to regulators, insurers, and the public that requirements were being met.
In my early outreach to facility managers, I noticed a recurring pattern that the team had been interpreting as simple lack of interest.
Prospective customers weren't disinterested in the product's technical capabilities — they acknowledged the thermal cameras were impressive, the QR-based cleaning tracking was clever. But every conversation kept drifting to the same territory: their compliance burden. How do I prove to my regional inspector that we're meeting CDC guidelines? Can this generate the documentation I need for our insurance audit? Does this map to OSHA's updated requirements?
The product was answering a question nobody was asking ("How can I automate my safety processes?") while ignoring the question everyone was desperate to answer ("How can I prove I'm compliant?").
DEFINING SCOPE
Why I Focused on Manual Cleaning
Health inspectors were conducting frequent unannounced visits, and facility managers needed instant access to compliance documentation.
Thermal imaging largely ran itself. Manual cleaning compliance was where the human coordination gaps — and the liability risk — lived. With limited capacity, the team decided to test that assumption first.
Regulatory Pressure
CDC, OSHA, and local health departments had issued specific surface disinfection protocols. Facilities needed documented proof of adherence to remain operational. Thermal imaging had no equivalent documentation burden.
Legal & Insurance Liability
Facilities faced potential litigation if someone contracted COVID on-premises and they couldn't document their cleaning protocols. Insurance policies required cleaning compliance records.
Human Coordination Gap
Thermal imaging was already automated — set up cameras and the system runs. Manual cleaning required coordinating teams, tracking tasks, verifying quality, and maintaining audit-ready records. This was the biggest pain point.
UI AUDIT
A Dashboard That Tracked Activity, Not Compliance
Metric Without Regulatory Context
The prominent 98.7% "Cleaning Coverage" score was meaningless in a compliance context. A facility manager cannot tell an inspector "we're at 98.7%" without citing which regulation it's measured against. The metric tracked operational coverage, not regulatory adherence.
Activity Tracking ≠ Compliance Tracking
The dashboard tracked cleaning activity (what was cleaned, when, by whom) but said nothing about compliance status (which regulations are being met). These are fundamentally different mental models — one is retrospective operational data, the other is forward-looking risk management.
No Regulatory Mapping
There was no way to see which specific compliance requirements — CDC surface disinfection guidelines, OSHA workplace safety standards, state-level health codes — were being fulfilled by each cleaning activity. The data existed but the connection was invisible.
Flat Data Hierarchy
The cleaning log treated all activities equally. There was no visual or structural distinction between mandatory regulatory cleanings and optional maintenance tasks — making it impossible to quickly assess compliance risk.
Reactive Instead of Proactive
The dashboard only showed what had already happened. It offered no guidance on what needed to happen next to maintain compliance — no upcoming deadlines, no gap alerts, no at-risk indicators. Facility managers were left to mentally track compliance cadences.
No Audit-Ready Output
The data format wasn't structured for regulatory inspections. An inspector needs to verify compliance by regulation, not by room or by employee. Generating a compliance report required manual data restructuring.
Missing Document Layer
Compliance requires more than activity records: certificates, staff training records, product safety data sheets, and signed checklists. None of these supporting documents were accessible from the compliance view — a critical gap for audit readiness.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Compliance Is Not One Thing
Compliance is not a single, static requirement.
Compliance is not a single, static requirement. It's a layered, shifting landscape that varies across multiple dimensions simultaneously: by industry (a cruise ship has different protocols than an office building), by geography (federal requirements differ from state-level, which differ from county-level), by facility type (a hospital wing vs. an outpatient clinic), and by regulatory body (OSHA, CDC, local health departments).
UX Challenge
Designing a compliance layer that could flex across all these dimensions without becoming overwhelming was the core UX challenge.
Adding to the difficulty: we had no existing users to interview.
The product hadn't achieved significant adoption yet. I needed to find potential users and learn from them simultaneously — conducting outreach to compliance officers while also researching the regulatory landscape and ideating design solutions.
Team Capacity Problem
This problem required working across three streams in parallel: finding and talking to compliance professionals, deeply researching industry-specific regulations, and generating design concepts informed by both. Our team didn't have resources for such extensive work.
APPROACH
Building Without a Blueprint
Without an established user base, I had to conduct cold outreach to compliance officers. Here are the key findings:
Regulation-First Mental Model
Compliance officers think in terms of regulations, not rooms or employees. They need to answer: "Are we meeting CDC Guideline X?" — not "Was Room 21 cleaned today?"
One Task, Multiple Regulations
A single cleaning activity often satisfies requirements from multiple regulatory bodies simultaneously. The ability to map this many-to-many relationship was seen as critical.
Industry Templates Save Weeks
Setting up compliance tracking from scratch was a major barrier. Pre-configured templates for specific industries (hospitality, healthcare, transportation) would dramatically reduce time-to-value.
DESIGN EXPLORATIONS
Rethinking the Compliance Layer
The core challenge was organizing compliance information across three levels: regulation status, task mapping, and audit documentation.
The Compliance Hub replaces the single aggregate score with regulation-specific cards. Each card maps directly to a regulatory framework, showing progress toward full compliance. The task table below connects individual cleaning activities to the regulations they satisfy.
The Industry Configuration screen solves the "compliance varies everywhere" problem through templates. Rather than requiring facility managers to manually identify and configure every applicable regulation, they select their industry and the system auto-loads the relevant compliance frameworks — dramatically reducing setup time and cognitive load.
The Audit Report Builder addresses the most acute pain point: producing compliance documentation on short notice during inspections. The report is organized by regulation (matching how inspectors think), includes evidence chains, and highlights gaps with specific remediation urgency.
PROPOSED DESIGN
The Compliance-First Experience
Key design decisions: The compliance hub organizes information by regulation rather than by room — matching how facility managers think during inspections.
The new design shifts the mental model from "what cleaning happened" to "are we meeting our regulatory obligations."
Color-coded status cards leverage loss aversion (red draws immediate attention to non-compliant areas). The "Next Due" column enables proactive management rather than reactive tracking. Multi-regulation tags on individual tasks make the many-to-many relationship between activities and regulations visible.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MEANTIME
Major Product Strategy Miscalculation
While talking to facility managers I noticed a trend - the industries that we trageted couldn't buy. Industries that we started targeting later - like warehousing and logistics - already had similar solutions. They never stopped operations - they had to keep the supply chain uninterrupted. On the other hand, tourism and hospitality and sports and education had to close. We targeted wrong industries. Also, as the pandemic progressed, vaccination picked up and the product never received adoption.