OpenRemote
User Experience of the Manager UI
OpenRemote is a 100% open-source IoT platform that acts as the central brain for smart cities, energy grids, and large-scale manufacturing. It’s built to bridge the gap between the physical (for example sensors, vehicles, and city infrastructure) and the digital (weather forecasts, energy prediction models, and API data).
By stitching these together, it transforms thousands of data points into a single interface where integrators can actually monitor, control, and automate entire environments.
The Manager is where users build their systems, but over time it can turn into a bit of a maze. The interface relied on deeply nested attributes that simply didn't scale as we added more features. Every new update made the whole thing feel more overcomplicated.
I wanted to move away from that clutter and create a workspace that felt fast and intuitive, but more importantly, a system that could scale without needing a complete overhaul every time we released new features.
I shifted the focus from designing individual screens to building a library of master components. We used Vaadin as the foundation, and I developed a suite of custom components specifically for the way our users handle asset data. This made the interface feel predictable for the user and gave the dev team a clear set of rules to follow. We stopped reinventing the wheel with every release and started building on a foundation that actually makes sense.
