The Home of Smart Buildings, Smart Equipment & IoT

Creating UI Customizations with the Glue Team

Written by B. Scott Muench | 01 October 2020

Adopting new technology can be one of the most exciting or frustrating experiences for a user. If the user can’t navigate a product effectively or doesn’t have a positive experience, not only will they never realize the product’s full capabilities, they’ll move onto something that better suits them. This is why the user experience is such an important aspect of product development and why we offer professional services through our Glue Team to support OEMs building on the framework.

The Glue Team is a dedicated group of developers and engineers who “stay sticky” with our OEM partners to help them develop and adopt the FIN Framework. They have specialist knowledge of building automation, user interface software, and IoT requirements. Our Glue Team collaborates with customers by providing project managers, back end developers, and front end developers to supplement your team.

The Glue Team supports customers by offering a variety of professional services, such as the creation of user interfaces, configuration wizards, and applications. They also help with the development of connectors, templates, libraries, and algorithms. By leveraging the FIN Framework as a development environment, Glue Team Front End Developers work hard to create mockups and prototypes and specific components for our customers.

Meet Sarah Padilla

Customers who engage with the Glue Team get a chance to work with our brilliant Front End developer, Sarah Padilla. She has been working at J2 since 2017 and does a lot of custom apps and dashboards for customers. Sarah codes predominantly in React and Adobe Creative Cloud to develop specialized customer experiences for clients.

Front End developers like Sarah enjoy working with the FIN Framework because it’s flexible and supports standard web and UI technologies. She’s able to use her favorite tools, such as Creative Cloud (Adobe XD and Illustrator) to create graphics that go into FIN.

One project she just completed was the creation of the UI for our microBMS. It is a simple, step-by-step configuration wizard to help facilitate the installation of small to mid-sized systems without the need for specialised expertise.

“I used FIN’s built in functions to create custom apps so when you click on the application, it launches a React page, creating a step-by-step wizard. Once complete, the application automatically adds devices, creates dashboards, and the end user experience.”

Here’s a personal demo of how the wizard works from Sarah.

Learn more about our microBMS here. Learn more about the Glue Team here.