Designing a Safer Way to Work in Extreme Heat

Year: 2025

Role: Product Designer

Challenge

With heat-related injuries on the rise and increasing regulations around environmental safety, Perry Weather needed a smarter way to help teams make real-time decisions about heat exposure.

Safety managers were relying on manual processes to manage rest breaks during extreme heat. These decisions were inconsistent, time-consuming, and often unsafe.

We set out to build an in-app tool that could automatically display risk-adjusted work/rest cycles, tailored to each user’s location, workload, and clothing, while remaining easy to understand in the field.

Process

I started by talking directly with safety officers, EHS managers, and athletic trainers, uncovering common friction points:

  • No centralized source of truth

  • One-size-fits-all guidelines that ignored real conditions

  • Too many tools required to calculate safe break times

From there, I mapped the core workflows and translated safety policy logic into flexible, configurable UI components. I collaborated closely with our meteorology and engineering teams to design a system that adapts automatically based on:

  • Real-time conditions (WBGT, Heat Index, or Temp)

  • PPE and clothing layers

  • Workload intensity

From initial notes to final design.

Impact

The feature launched publicly in June 2025 and has already seen strong adoption across key customer segments, including construction firms and athletic departments.

Our early access users reported:

  • Faster decision-making under extreme heat

  • Increased confidence and policy compliance in the field

  • Reduced confusion thanks to simplified, visual guidance

Beyond safety, this feature supports customer goals around productivity, risk reduction, and liability mitigation.

Key Learnings

  • Designing for field use means every interaction needs to be quick, clear, and usable on mobile, especially when users are in high-stress, outdoor environments.

  • Visualizing complex policy logic (like intensity modifiers and clothing adjustments) required breaking things down into simple, reusable design patterns.