Designing a patented IoT user intelligence product from concept to granted patent.
Rad'r — an IoT-driven user behaviour intelligence platform at Verizon. From research through design to product concept and a granted US patent.
Not a brief. A question.
Unlike most projects that start with a brief, Rad'r started with a question: "What if we could understand user behaviour patterns in real environments to surface insights that improve decision-making?"
This was product innovation, not product refinement. There was no defined scope, no existing interface to iterate on, and no established user base. The design challenge was to take an open question and shape it into a coherent, valuable, and patentable product concept — from the first research session to the final IP filing.
Designer, researcher, prototype builder, and patent co-author.
This was one of the broadest-scope roles I've held — spanning early-stage research, UX design, data visualisation architecture, and ultimately the intellectual property process. Being a co-author on the granted patent reflects how deeply the design thinking shaped the product concept itself.
Five problems that defined the design direction.
15 behaviour analysis sessions. Three insights that changed everything.
From 15 user behaviour analysis sessions, 15 key insights were uncovered. But three stood out as the most design-defining — reshaping the entire product concept and ultimately informing the patent filing.
Three principles to govern every design decision.
Design thinking as protectable intellectual property.
The design work on Rad'r contributed directly to an intellectual property filing. The patent (US 11,545,023) covers the system's approach to user behaviour pattern detection and insight surfacing in IoT environments — a concept that emerged directly from the design and research process, not from engineering alone.
This was the first time design work I led contributed directly to a granted patent. It changed how I think about what design produces. Good design ideas — when they're novel, specific, and well-documented — are protectable. The discipline of design thinking, when applied rigorously to a hard problem, can generate intellectual property alongside user interfaces.
Being a co-author on the patent filing required me to articulate the design concepts at a level of specificity I'd never had to before. That process — translating design thinking into patent claims — was one of the most rigorous intellectual exercises of my career.
What IoT, data, and a patent process taught me about design.
Designing for IoT taught me that the challenge is always abstraction — how do you make sense of millions of data points for a human who needs to make one decision? The technology is rarely the bottleneck. The design layer — deciding what to show, when, and to whom — is where the real work happens.
Being involved in the patent process changed how I think about design fundamentally. Good design ideas are protectable. The specificity required to write a patent claim forced me to understand my own design decisions at a depth that made them stronger, not just documentable.
If I could revisit this project, I would have loved more time to test the insight-curation model with a wider range of user types. The three audiences we designed for represented the majority — but edge cases in data-intensive work often reveal the most interesting design opportunities.
