Shipped
Designing operational visibility
for industrial maintenance workflows
Streamlining service tracking, spare ordering, and maintenance workflows for Thermax customers across complex industrial ecosystems.
Duration
15 Weeks
My Role
UX Researcher & Designer
User research · UX strategy · Information architecture
Methods Used
Expert review · Stakeholder interviews · Ecosystem mapping · Heuristic evaluation · Workshop facilitation · Thematic analysis · Persona prioritisation · Journey mapping · Concept modelling · Wireframing · UX strategy
The Ask
Thermax Edge, the company's after-sales customer portal, was live but barely used. The leadership needed to understand why adoption had stalled and what it would take to fix it.
The Goal
Understanding the after-sales ecosystem, everything from the stakeholders to the tools and other touchpoints, and define a strategy that could drive adoption.
The Outcome
A validated research synthesis covering usability failures, experience mapping, user group prioritisation, and a concept model with a feature framework to help with the redesign.
3.4 x
Increase in monthly active users as self-serve flows replaced email and phone-based requests.
38%
Fewer incorrect spare orders, from linking every spare to its asset and real-time stock instead of free text.
180+
Videos, manuals, and articles unified into one searchable knowledge library across five industries.
UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXT
About the business
Thermax is one of India's energy and environment engineering companies, operating across multiple divisions, Cooling, Heating, Water & Waste Solutions, etc, that design, install, and maintain large industrial equipment for factories and plants across the country. For an ecosystem like this, the relationship with a customer doesn't end at the sale. Once equipment is deployed, it needs to be maintained, monitored, and serviced for years. This after-sales relationship is where trust is built or lost. To manage this at scale, the company built Thermax Edge, a customer-facing digital portal which is a single place customers go to manage assets, place orders, and get support after their equipment is deployed.
THE PROBLEM
What was the problem at hand?
Despite being live, Thermax Edge wasn’t a single place. Adoption was low, only 5 of 43 customers interviewed were actively using the portal, and just 2 of 22 had adopted Edge Live, a real-time monitoring offering, even though 20 more said they were interested. Another critical challenge was the domination of competitors for the re-ordering of assets, as they had an advantage of being cheaper than the Thermax assets. While the businesses saved money on the duplicate assets, in the long run, these duplicates impacted the functioning of the machinery, reducing the longevity of the machinery.
Through our initial rounds of stakeholder interviews and discovery workshops, there were two pertinent questions that came up,
What are the gaps in the overall system that throws end users out of the loop?
In what areas is the tool lacking that impacts the stickiness of the platform?
DIVING DEEPER IN THE PROBLEM
A little about Thermax Edge and its users
Thermax Edge was built with the intention of providing post-sales support to its customers. The customer-facing portal helps users:
Have information about all the deployed assets handy, right from asset details, to ownership, health, as well as history
Track the raised enquiries and orders
Raise maintenance requests for the deployed assets and order for spare parts
Get access to troubleshooting guidelines and other knowledge materials
STAKEHOLDERS
The major stakeholders of the Thermax Edge platform are people who work in the factories and plants where these assets are deployed. While there is a hierarchy and multiple people who need access to some or all parts of the data that gets collected, majorly, there are 4 key users of the platform
Plant Head / Owner
Seeks high-level insights on how the machinery is operating and timely alerts in case of breakdowns or any downtime.
Utility Manager
Seeks an easy way to run routine checks and compliance logs across sites without manual follow-ups.
Maintenance Manager
Seeks a single place to log issues, request service, and track resolution status without losing sight of what's pending.
Purchase Manager
Seeks quick access to quotations and vendor comparisons so POs can be raised and negotiated.
ANALYSING THE TOOL
An audit of the existing platform
Before delving into the interviews, an audit of the existing tool was conducted to understand the functionality gaps. The tool was analysed against various parameters like navigation, content, interactions to get to the bottom of the issues that the users may potentially be facing.
The platform doesn't feel reliable. Broken redirects and dead-end screens chip away at users' trust that the platform will actually work when they need it to.
Core tasks are fragmented. Processes like booking a spare/service are scattered across disconnected screens with no way to save progress.
Information doesn't match reality. Status labels, naming conventions, and error messages often don't reflect what's actually happening.
There's no consistent design or interaction language. The same actions behave differently across sections, and static content is often indistinguishable from clickable elements.
There were also certain page level insights that were derived which would help in the conceptualisation phase,
Login
Users have no way to get help or find support info if something goes wrong during login.
Homepage
Too much information is showcased at once with no clear hierarchy, leaving users unsure what to focus on.
Assets
Searching and filtering overlap in function, making a simple task feel unnecessarily complex.
Asset Details
Static information is styled like clickable actions, so users expect interactivity that isn't there.
Book Spare / Service
The booking process is broken into disconnected steps, so users lose progress if anything goes wrong.
Track
Status labels don't match what's actually happening, so users can't tell the real state of their order.
ANALYSING THE JOURNEY
Understanding the end users' perspectives
An audit wasn't enough to explain adoption numbers this low. So we zoomed out and spoke to various internal and external stakeholders ti understand more about the overall ecosystem and it's functioning.
INTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS
13
Cooling
17
Enviro
12
Heating
18
Water
5
TBWES
EXTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS
12
Corporate
17
Medium Enterprise
15
Owner-Driven
11
Dealers
5
TBWES
What emerged was that Edge's usability problems were symptoms of deeper structural gaps between the teams and processes meant to feed it:
A flawed internal data backbone
Teams pull data out of ERP into spreadsheets and track it manually, there's no shared data system feeding the platform, so Edge often can't reflect what's actually happening on the ground.
Data that isn't real-time, or relevant
A complaint raised by a customer might not appear on the portal for hours, sometimes a day, and what does appear is often too generic to be useful.
No real customer database
Without one, Thermax has no reliable way to proactively reach customers post-deployment, several stakeholders linked this directly to customers drifting to competitors.
Dealers caught in the middle
Dealers are often the most trusted relationship a customer has. A platform that lets customers go direct to Thermax can look like a threat, so dealers have little incentive to promote it.
Access isn't evenly distributed
Many field-based users, technicians on a factory floor, staff at a chemical plant, don't reliably have laptop access, making a web-first portal impractical for them.
Little reason to come back
With no personalisation, nudges, or incentives like ETAs or spare recommendations, there's not much pulling customers back between transactions.
MAPPING THE EXPERIENCE
Bringing it all together
Laid side by side, the two pieces of research reinforced each other. The interface-level problems weren't isolated design mistakes, they were what happens when a digital product is built on top of a fragmented and largely manual internal process.
DECODING DATA
Patterns from the data collected
After consolidating all the data collected from interviews, stakeholder conversations and the tool audit, and after mapping an experience map of the end-to-end process, there were certain themes that came up which could pave the way for the redesign.
Asset health & maintenance
95%+ of customers struggle to track, monitor, and manage their assets and individual components.
Onboarding experience
Almost every customer found onboarding cumbersome, with login issues causing early drop-off.
Preventive maintenance
Customers want advance alerts before issues occur, not just a log of what already went wrong.
Smart analytics
A desire for the platform to surface insight and recommendations, not just raw data.
Need for varied platforms
Web isn't always accessible, field users often prefer mobile or a phone call.
Troubleshooting guidelines
Customers want self-serve guidance so they're not fully dependent on reaching an engineer.
Digitisation of all processes
Manual documentation across dealers and internal teams is a repeated source of lost information.
Role-based access & transparency
Different personas need different views, and real-time visibility, not day-later updates.
Little reason to come back
With no personalisation, nudges, or incentives like ETAs or spare recommendations, there's not much pulling customers back between transactions.
Hence, the big question was,
How might we design a connected after-sales experience, spanning the platform, Thermax's internal teams, and its dealer network, that gives every customer real-time visibility and control over their assets, in a way that fits how they already work?
PRIORITISING PERSONAS
Where the design efforts should go first
Not every persona carries equal weight in shaping the ecosystem's overall health, so we prioritised based on frequency of platform interaction and downstream impact on adoption.
★★★
Maintenance Manager & Purchase Manager
These two personas interact with the after-sales journey most frequently and directly, and are the most likely to work around the platform entirely, via phone, email, or a dealer, when it fails them. Fixing their experience has the widest ripple effect on whether Edge gets used at all.
★★
Plant Head / Owner & Dealers
Plant Heads are decision-makers critical to platform credibility. Dealers are central to the ecosystem and need to be brought in as a supported part of the platform.
★
Utility Manager
A smaller, more specialised segment with real but narrower needs, best addressed once the core experience for higher-impact personas is solid.
Introducing Thermax Edge 2.0
A single portal that turns spare ordering, service tracking, and maintenance knowledge into a few taps instead of a phone call.
Asset Performance Homepage
Every asset's status, one glance away
Gives facility managers a single place for asset performance, deployed assets, active orders, open complaints, and recommended service actions surface together instead of being scattered across separate order-tracking and complaint tools.
Key Design Decision
Ranked sections by urgency rather than by system of record, so pending orders and in‑progress complaints sit above browsing‑oriented content like recommendations and FAQs.
Asset Detail View
Everything about one asset, in one place
Consolidates warranty status, spare-part offerings, maintenance recommendations, order history, and documentation for a single asset into one scrollable record, removing the need to jump between separate tracking and document systems.
Key Design Decision
Sequenced content by lifecycle stage, identity and warranty first, available actions, then historical records, so a user can act on the asset before they ever need to dig through its history.
Service & Spares Booking Flow
From asset to order, in three guided steps
Replaces a free-form request email with a structured flow, pick the asset, select the spares, then review everything before it's submitted as a single enquiry.
Key Design Decision
Kept stock-checking and cataloguing inside the flow itself, availability, quantity, and prior purchase history all surface at the moment of selection, so nobody has to leave the request to go verify what's actually in stock.
Order & Service Tracking
Every order's status, without a support call
Lets people check an order themselves instead of calling support. Search any order, enquiry, or service request, then open it to see its stage, its complaints and paperwork, and which items are still on the way.
Key Design Decision
The six-stage tracker stays fixed at the top of the page. Switching to Complaints or Related Documents never hides where the order actually stands.
KNOWLEDGE SECTION
One library for how-to, reference, and industry insights
Brings installation videos, manuals, daily-operations documents, and editorial articles into a single browsable hub, instead of a facility manager hunting across email attachments, a shared drive, and a marketing blog for the same information.
Key Design Decision
The library ends with an industry shelf, Automobile, Agriculture, Textile, Cement, Construction. People can find content by their own industry, not just by file type.
The impact this created
3.4 x
Increase in monthly active users
Facility teams moved from occasional check-ins to using the app as their default way to request, track, and manage assets.
42%
Faster service & spares requests
A three-step guided flow with live stock and asset data replaced free-form email requests.
Thank you for stopping by!
I’m always learning, evolving and designing with curiosity, so if you have thoughts, feedback or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you!
© 2026 Anushka Belsare | Created With Empathy