HASS- Unifying a Global Service Ecosystem
HASS- Unifying a Global Service Ecosystem
A Strategic UX Transformation for Samsung Electronics
A Strategic UX Transformation for Samsung Electronics
2023 - Ongoing
2023 - Ongoing
Backstory
Samsung’s global service infrastructure was a fragmented legacy web. With 50+ disparate tools and 30+ appliance silos, the system was buckling under its own weight.
Mandate came top-down from Samsung HQ Korea — not only a design initiative, a business intervention
Samsung's Digital Appliance division was bleeding money on service operations
Home Appliance Smart Service (HASS) — the tool 20,000+ engineers relied on daily — was a direct contributor to that loss
Project arrived at Samsung Design Delhi with CFO-level visibility on outcomes
Role & Responsibilities
Design Lead Strategy, Research, IA, Wireframing, UX & GUI, Usability Testing, Dev QA
Team
3 Designers · PM · Engineering · Customer Experience · CFO reporting
Scale
20,000+ field engineers · 50+ countries
Recognition
🏆 iF Design Award 2026
🥇 Samsung Gold Prize
Watch this video for a quick overview of HASS
Data Update: Figures shown in this video have been adjusted for internal confidentiality.
As of 2026, the HASS ecosystem has expanded its global footprint to over 20,000+ service engineers
My Contribution
Bridge between design team and CFO-level stakeholders — translating design decisions into business outcomes
Managed four distinct stakeholder relationships: Group Head of Service · PM · Developement · Customer Experinece
Philosophy: Collective intelligence over individual direction — every designer owned the product, end to end.
Hands on design (UX Guides, Usability Reports, Visuals etc.)
SETTING THE CONTEXT: MISSION CONTROL
In the movie Gravity, Dr. Ryan Stone is a specialist performing high-stakes engineering in the most unforgiving environment known to man: the vacuum of space.
She is tethered to a station, reliant on her tools and her lifeline to Mission Control. When debris strikes, that tether snaps, and she is left drifting, isolated, overwhelmed, and fighting for every breath.
In the Samsung ecosystem, 20,000+ Service Engineers are those astronauts.
They are the "boots on the ground," often working in isolation in a customer's home. When they arrive, the "atmosphere" is already thin, the customer is frustrated, the appliance is dead, and the brand’s image is on the line. They need their tools to be their lifeline.
THE PROBLEM SCENARIO
It’s a hot Tuesday afternoon. Mark is in a customer’s kitchen with a dismantled refrigerator. The customer is hovering, asking when the ice maker will work again. Mark just needs to check the wiring schematic to finish the job.
The Digital Maze: Open the HASS app → Wait for the "Loading" spinner... and wait → Navigate through 5 disparate tool silos → Realize the app crashed because of low signal.
Too much struggle! Mark is drifting, and the customer’s trust is leaking.
Mark is inches away from the fix, but he’s drowning in data. He needs a specific code for a "Compressor Failure," but the app is treating him like a stranger in his own cockpit.
The Struggle: The Memory Game: Search through the void of 3 years of memory → Try to find a signal in the noise of 50+ fragmented tools.
This "Information Latency" swallows productivity. It strips the engineer of their expertise, leaving them drifting in a state of anxiety and confusion right in front of the customer.
Back at HQ, the CFO is looking at the "Service Efficiency" report. The "Multiple Visit" metric is glowing red.
Every time Mark "drifts" in that kitchen, the company loses money.
To understand the magnitude of the rescue, we must first look at the void. This is the fragmented reality our engineers faced every day.
First Interaction with the app
When we opened the app for the first time, what we found wasn't a broken product. It was an abandoned one.
Engineers had long since stopped trusting it and built workarounds — unofficial systems, manual notes, peer-to-peer calls — just to get through a service visit.
The app existed. It just wasn't being used the way it was intended. That gap between what the system expected and what engineers actually did was where the business was hemorrhaging money
THE STRATEGY: MISSION CONTROL
The first thing I did wasn't design. It was alignment.
I initiated multi-stakeholder meetings to map the full scope — not just what needed to be fixed, but why it had broken down, who owned what, and what success would actually mean to a CFO watching the P&L.
The mandate was absolute: transform a failing legacy infrastructure into a high-velocity ecosystem with zero seconds of downtime.
To stop the drift, we focused on three core goals:
The Crisis : Domino Effect
A radical overhaul risked paralyzing the entire global service system.
A failed migration wouldn't just repeat past financial losses; it would trigger a total collapse of technician trust, effectively grounding the workforce.
The Strategic Objective
Unify the global teams across SDD (Design), SRI-D (Dev), and HQ (Seoul).
We had to move from 50+ fragmented leaks to a singular, resilient "Oxygen Supply" - the new HASS framework.
The Ownership
Without that shared clarity, a team can't move with conviction.
Everyone needed to understand the seriousness of what we were being asked to do — and own it.
THE EVOLUTION: FROM RESCUE TO REVOLUTION
How we transformed a fragmented legacy tool into an intelligent service ecosystem
PHASE 1: THE STABILIZATION
(2023 – Q2 2024)
Mission: Stop the Drift. The initial mandate was to migrate the core logic without breaking the global service operation.
We conducted in-person usability testing & user interview with 5 experienced service engineers in Delhi NCR — 5 to 10 years of HASS experience, a mix of generalists and specialists.
The method was deliberate: give them real tasks on the existing app, observe without intervening, record everything. Then analyse.
We looked at everything — flow logic, button colour, icon choice, error states, engineering faults.
Nothing was too small if an engineer hesitated on it.
Key Findings
Three things emerged that shaped the design direction:
Every engineer needed help at some point with the existing system. Not because they lacked skill — because the system gave them nothing to orient by.
Report submission uncertainty was the direct cause of revisits. No confirmation. No failure state. Engineers left homes not knowing if the job was logged.
Infrequent tasks broke completely. One engineer's last firmware update was in 2019. The system offered no help finding it. The file went to general phone storage and disappeared
"We have to search for downloaded files in our phone's internal storage. They get lost among other files."
The Diversity
We couldn't visit every country. The budget didn't allow for field research across 50+ markets, and the timeline wouldn't have permitted it anyway.
So I built a different strategy.
I convinced the PM that structured VOCs were non-negotiable.
We built the framework. Each market ran it.
Same questions. Consistent structure. Local execution. It gave us signal across regions without requiring presence in every one of them.
Benchmarking
We studied 10 service and diagnostic applications across three verticals
Appliance (Bosch, LG, Siemens)
Network (Jio, Airtel)
Automotive (Carly, BlueDriver, Tesla, Mercedes).
Many redesign decision in HASS traces back to something observed externally:
The Built
Key flows were selected through a structured prioritisation — team voting combined with critical workflow issue data. The highest-friction, highest-frequency problems went first.
From there, the process was deliberate: User flows → Interaction logic → Wireframes → Final screens.
Once designs were confirmed by the SDD Design Head, we handed off to development with a complete specification guide — nothing left to interpretation
To bridge the critical gap between Design & Dev, before the Design System existed, I established a rigorous "Quality Tether" to prevent the user experience from drifting.
Continuous Feedback Loop: Implemented a weekly build audit cycle, manually flagging visual and logical inconsistencies in the live APKs.
Manual Sanity Checks: Acted as the human guardrail, providing pixel-level feedback to developers to ensure design consistency and prevent "Design Debt" during the migration.
The Validation
We brought 5 experienced service engineers into a structured session again: 6 real-world tasks on the newly developed app and a System Usability Scale assessment.
80% task completion without assistance. SUS 86%
"Quick Actions would really save my time — these contain the most regularly used options." "With this new layout I could quickly understand what to do next." "Convenient to switch guides by just a swipe. Saves time without going to another page."
PHASE 2: THE ARCHITECTURE
(Q3 2024 – Q4 2024)
Goal: Build the Engine. We moved from "fixing screens" to building a scalable language. The focus shifted to bridging the gap between Design and Dev.
The foundation we built: Enterprise One UI — One UI adapted for field service. Glanceable hierarchies. Large touch targets. Single-hand navigation.
Friction Reduction: Reduced dev-design handover time
Metric: By Q4, we achieved $59K in immediate service cost savings, proving the ROI to the CFO.
Some of the key design elements that reshaped HASS
Introduced a unified home screen, centralizing key diagnostics and tools so technicians could start every job with clarity and consistency.
A simplified, always-accessible navigation drawer that unifies all major modules into one consistent entry point, enabling technicians to move faster, switch tasks effortlessly, and access tools from anywhere in the app.
An integrated repair flow with searchable access to Samsung’s service library, offering step-by-step guidance during complex diagnostics.
PHASE 3: THE PROPULSION (2025)
Mission: Expand the Payload.
With the foundation solid, HQ authorized the expansion into high-complexity Commercial AC systems.
PC-to-Mobile Integration: We identified service engineers relied on heavy laptops for diagnostics of commercial AC systems. I led the integration of this complex PC software into the HASS mobile ecosystem.
Platform Scale: Expanded support to Tablet & iOS for broader field coverage.
The impact we made?
$M
in annual savings by cutting repeat visits and streamlining workflows, while creating a scalable system that reduced long-term maintenance overhead
x
faster, more accurate repairs, enhancing trust, satisfaction, and the overall reliability of Samsung’s service experience
PHASE 4: AGENTIC ORBIT & EXPANSION (Q3,25 – Present)
Goal : Automate the Pilot. Unify the Fleet.
HASS is no longer just a tool engineers use. It is evolving from "just a tool" to one that watches, learns, and works with them, reducing cognitive load, unifying the Samsung service ecosystem, and making every field engineer feel like they have the whole organization behind them.
Agentic UX — Piloting AI that acts before you ask. Predictive Alerts flag likely faults before the visit begins. Smart Scheduling manages the engineer's workday based on proximity, specialisation, and history.
New Interaction Patterns — Exploring novel interaction models for field service — faster, more intuitive, built for the physical and cognitive reality of an engineer mid-job.
Visual Rebirth — Launched a new logo and identity to mark the shift — from legacy utility to modern intelligent ecosystem.
& expanding the design system beyond HASS to unify SALT and GSP-N under a single, consistent design language.
We didn't just ship a tool — we established a new standard for service
One look, one feel, across the entire Samsung service fleet
PERSONAL REFLECTION
On conflict
At global scale, conflict is the material — not a blocker.
VOCs became our shared language. When decisions were contested, we returned to the engineer's voice.
It resolved more disagreements than any alignment workshop.
On what VOCs miss
They capture what people say.
They don't capture what's shaped by culture so deeply that no one thinks to name it.
Regional nuances — interaction patterns, trust signals, how engineers in different markets relate to authority and documentation — were scoped out.
That's the first thing the next version should solve.
On domain knowledge
None of us were field service experts on day one.
We spent months studying the nature of service apps — the cadence of a repair visit, the psychology of a technician mid-diagnosis.
That immersion was slow. It was also what made the design credible.
You can't design for trust if you don't understand what it costs to break it.
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