Install Field Report · Port of San Antonio.
PH—003
UX discovery and readiness audit ran in parallel on the Port of San Antonio install. What surfaced in the audit changed the UX work. What surfaced in the UX work changed the ontology. Here is what we found.
I What We Installed
The Port of San Antonio is a nineteen-hundred-acre public innovation campus. The install scope was commercialization-layer AI. Three objectives: surface where the tenant mix was underperforming the campus narrative, score campus-wide readiness, and ship an operational dashboard leadership would actually open.
Install ran nine days. Four capabilities came fully online. Two ran at partial scope pending additional data connectors.
II What We Found
The audit produced a score of eighty-seven. High for public innovation. The UX discovery, running in parallel with twenty users surveyed and a twelve-user live A/B test, produced a different finding.
The tenant positioning on the public-facing site framed the campus as a “cyber innovation hub.” The A/B test surfaced that “real estate” framing beat “cyber innovation hub” on both comprehension and conversion. The audit had not seen this. The audit was measuring operational readiness, not market-facing narrative fit.
The dashboard then surfaced its own finding: a metric the team had been reporting for three quarters was measuring the wrong thing. The ontology flagged it. The team had not.
III What Changed Because of It
Three changes shipped out of the install:
- Site framing moved from “cyber innovation hub” to the real-estate register. Conversion on the hero path improved materially.
- The reporting metric was deprecated. A replacement metric, derived from tool logs already being collected, replaced it.
- The dashboard itself was simplified. What had been four views consolidated to one. The team opened it more often.
IV What We’d Do Differently
We would run the UX discovery before the audit, not in parallel. The audit catches operational reality. The UX discovery catches external perception. Those two realities disagreed on this install in a way the audit alone could not surface.
For the ontology, this install added one filter: narrative fit. Seven public-innovation installs since have used it. Two have flagged the same disagreement pattern. The methodology compounded.