Isolation Points Reimagined

overview

Bringing clarity to complex safety workflows

This project focused on designing a clear, efficient, and scalable experience for managing isolation points — critical components in connected lockout/tagout (cLOTO) systems — empowering users to add, view, and manage these points with clarity and control across complex safety workflows.

business and user problem

A platform misaligned with real-world needs...

Early in the cLOTO redesign, I identified a critical usability gap in the isolation point experience and advocated for a full redesign. Through conversations with alpha users, a recurring pattern emerged: the original platform supported only three isolation point types — far too few to reflect the variety of real-world energy sources. Terminology and labels were misaligned with standard industry practices, and isolation points existed in silos with no visibility into lockout status or associated procedures.

Person in black gloves holding smartphone over machinery in an industrial setting.

...costing users trust and the business conversions

The system felt unintuitive to users, and prospective customers frequently dropped off after demos. Recognizing the impact on both user satisfaction and business conversion, I led the initiative to redefine the experience — aligning it with user needs, improving clarity and functionality, and strengthening the platform's overall market competitiveness.

my role

End-to-end design ownership, from research to delivery

As Design Lead and Senior Product Designer, I owned the full UX and interaction design process — spanning discovery research, information architecture, high-fidelity prototyping, usability testing, and final design specifications — while also authoring all UX copy to ensure clarity and consistency across the interface.

design process

Defining the building blocks of a safer workflow

The original platform supported only three isolation point types:

tryout;
electrical;
mechanical.

Even these labels caused confusion during alpha testing: "tryout" and "mechanical" weren't immediately meaningful to the workers and safety managers who would be using them daily. Drawing on alpha user feedback and knowledge shared by the sales team — who had deep insight into real-world facility needs — we expanded the list to 15 distinct types. "Tryout" became "Attention," "Mechanical" became "Gravity," and a full range of real-world energy sources was accounted for:

Chemical;
Computer;
Control Panel;
Electrical;
Gas;
Gravity;
Pneumatic;
Phone;
Product;
Remote Control;
Stored Pressure;
Steam;
Water.

pain point:

The original solution had 3 isolation point types with confusing labels - tryout, electric, mechanical

...grounded in how workers actually interpret symbols...

With the types defined, each one needed a dedicated icon that would be universally recognizable in an industrial setting. I ran a symbolism survey — gathering multiple symbol options for each type and asking participants to select the ones that resonated most. This ensured the final iconography was grounded in how real users interpret visual language in their environment, not just design convention.

approach:

Iconography needs to be grounded in how real users interpret visual language in their environment

Scroll/swipe to explore

Survey introduction explaining feedback request on isolation point icons for MasterLock cLOTO solution.

Safety question with icons: speaker, exclamation mark in circle, and exclamation mark in triangle.

Survey question on control panel icons showing power button, button board, and gear cog options.

Quiz question with chemical icons: atom structure and beaker with bubbles as options.

Survey question with three hydraulic isolation point icon options and two additional answer choices.

...and colors already familiar in the field...

For colors, I reviewed existing procedure printouts commonly used across industrial facilities and adopted the color associations already established in that world — so that a worker encountering cLOTO for the first time would find the visual language immediately familiar.

However, these industry-standard colors are vivid and high-saturation — and when applied as text backgrounds, as they appear on procedure printouts, they fail accessibility contrast standards. I proposed using lighter shades of the same colors to preserve recognizability while meeting accessibility requirements, but the sales and product teams pushed back unanimously: lighter shades, they argued, would no longer carry the same immediate recognition in the field.

...with an accessibility challenge that required a creative solution

Rather than compromising on either accessibility or recognizability, I explored ways to incorporate the full-saturation colors into the isolation point UI without using them as text backgrounds. The final solution passed accessibility standards while preserving the bold, immediately recognizable color associations the field teams insisted on — and was well received by both the product team and users.

solution:

Passes accessibility standards while preserving the bold, immediately recognizable color associations the field

Dropdown list for selecting energy types including Electrical, Gas, Water, Steam, Chemical, Pneumatic, and others.

explorations:

Designing the Experience — Strategically

Rethinking how isolation points are viewed,...

Before redesigning anything, I took stock of what existed: isolation points could only be viewed in a card layout. Recognizing that EHS managers — our primary users — spend much of their working lives in spreadsheets, I proposed adding a table view as an alternative. The two views serve different needs: the table view supports quick scanning and data comparison, while the card view accommodates the visual nature of isolation points — where images serve as critical identifiers, and a card allows for a larger, more immediate view than a table thumbnail ever could. Giving users the ability to switch between both put control in their hands.

improvement:

Ability to switch between table and card view

...expanding what a single isolation point can communicate,...

I also advocated for a dedicated full-screen detail page for each isolation point — recognizing that the volume of critical information simply couldn't be surfaced effectively within a card. To define what that page should contain, I researched what data was essential to capture for each isolation point. The final data model included:

name
energy type
associated equipment
a main identifying image,
both lockout application and removal methods — each supported by up to five step-by-step images.

This structure ensured that every isolation point carried everything a worker would need to apply or remove a lock safely and correctly.

...establishing image behavior as a cross-platform pattern,...

The depth of image functionality required by isolation points — thumbnails, full-screen expansion, multi-image scrolling — prompted me to document cross-platform image behavior as a reusable UX pattern. This ensured that how images are uploaded, displayed, and interacted with would be consistent wherever they appeared across the platform, not just within isolation point management.

..standardizing the language across the platform,...

I identified a significant inconsistency in status terminology across the platform: the same states were described using multiple conflicting labels — "blocked," "busy," and "under maintenance" for a locked-out point; "unblocked" and "free" for an available one. I proposed and drove the adoption of a clear, consistent language system — "locked out" and "active" — eliminating ambiguity and reducing cognitive load for field users. I also introduced the ability to duplicate isolation points, directly addressing user feedback around the time-intensive process of adding entries with similar properties.

...and bringing it all together into complete, tested flows

With the structure, data model, and language defined, I translated everything into complete flows — covering happy paths, empty states, loading states, conditional logic, and error handling. Each flow was built with the full range of user scenarios in mind, ensuring the experience held up not just in ideal conditions, but in the edge cases that field environments inevitably surface.

Refinements & Finalization

Magnitude and kind: what the original platform had missed,...

Testing surfaced several meaningful refinements. Magnitude and kind emerged as a critical isolation point property — one that hadn't existed in the original platform at all. As a baseline, I studied how the industry-standard software handled it. The existing UX wasn't intuitive: options were poorly organized and the flow felt disconnected from the broader isolation point creation experience.

I explored ways to make the interaction more natural, identified inconsistencies, and worked through the best approach for navigating long lists of options. The final solution was a contextual, fluid flow: as soon as a user selects an isolation point type, a magnitude or kind dropdown appears — populated only with the options relevant to that type. For isolation point types where the field didn't add meaningful value, I removed it entirely. The result was a leaner, more purposeful flow that guided users without overwhelming them.

...an image upload experience built for the field,...

Image upload was another area that benefited from iterative prototyping. Given that images serve as critical identifiers and step-by-step safety references, the upload experience needed to be intuitive and reliable — even for users in the field on mobile devices. I prototyped and refined the interaction in detail, ensuring the flow felt natural across both web and mobile contexts.

...and a handoff that left nothing to interpretation

The final design specifications were built to the highest level of detail — documenting every screen, state, condition, and interaction. Errors, loading states, empty states, edge cases, and conditional logic were all accounted for and annotated, leaving no room for developers or QA to second-guess intent. The goal was a handoff package so thorough that the implementation could proceed with confidence and minimal back-and-forth.

handoff:

Every screen in the spec has the same level of detail as the Name input field below

outcome

A structured, field-ready foundation for industrial safety

The redesigned experience established a clear, scalable foundation for isolation point management within the cLOTO platform. Users can now easily identify, track, and interact with isolation points across large industrial sites — reducing setup time by 30%, minimizing errors, and strengthening safety compliance.

key contributions

Led end-to-end UX design and research, from discovery through final specifications

Identified critical usability and terminology gaps, advocating for a full redesign of the isolation point experience
Defined the taxonomy, iconography, and visual language for 15 isolation point types
Standardized platform-wide status terminology, eliminating conflicting labels and reducing user confusion
Drove the expansion of the isolation point card to a full-screen details page, enabling richer communication of critical safety data
Built and tested high-fidelity interactive prototypes in ProtoPie across 2 rounds of testing with 6 EHS managers
Authored all UX copy to ensure clarity and consistency across the interface
Collaborated cross-functionally with product and safety engineering to align design with compliance standards

what I'd do differently

More field exposure, earlier

Given more time, I would have pushed for direct observation sessions with field workers in active industrial environments earlier in the process. While EHS managers provided invaluable insight, there's a meaningful distinction between how safety procedures are managed versus how they're executed on the floor. Earlier exposure to that context would have further sharpened the iconography decisions and terminology choices from the outset.