Id8 Control Desk Station

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
Learning from security professionals operating under time pressure and in complex situations required on-site fieldwork to observe, listen, and experience their workflows firsthand. I was a one-person UX person team in a newly introduced role, so the core challenge was to prove UX value. I defined responsibilities, embedded research and prototyping into established engineering workflows, and bridged technical constraints while co-creating a design system for embedded technologies with our UI developer. It also called for careful change management, as many colleagues and partners had never worked with UX. This challenge is exactly what motivated me: the chance to demonstrate UX’s tangible impact with a hands-on mentality.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
My aha-moment came during early prototype testing. When I asked a control room operator how many emergency calls out of all calls he handles per week, he replied, “For the end customer, every call is an emergency; I treat every caller with that sense of urgency.” That reframed the context of use for me: security communication demands deep empathy, and the operators’ work is mentally highly demanding. The first time our hardware successfully connected to the SIP server and a real call from another intercom station popped up on the display – was one of my personal highlights. It felt like the whole team had just stepped onto a new planet and we were celebrating a milestone together with the development team.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
Over the next five years, I plan to continually refine the interaction design across our hardware and software. At Commend, we will continue to advance control desk stations, making them even more user‑friendly, reliable, and fast. As our UX team grows, we will strengthen our position in the security industry by actively involving more end users in co‑creating new solutions. Our research goal is to build a dedicated lead user panel. This will enable us to work toward our UX vision: "We create trust and loyalty by ease and delight" For a small UX team of two, independent recognition – such as the UX Design Awards nomination – helps us grow and gain visibility across our company group and within the industry.