The Need
Engineering teams lacked a scalable way to collaborate around large, complex 3D assemblies without slow file transfers, fragmented review processes, or local performance limitations.
What I Led
Defined and designed a cloud-based collaboration platform enabling secure, high-performance interaction with detailed 3D models across distributed teams.
How it Worked
Translated complex CAD workflows into intuitive review, annotation, and sharing patterns optimized for cloud delivery and enterprise security constraints.
Impact
Established the MVP foundation for a new enterprise platform and validated core interaction models that shaped subsequent product direction.
Context
This project focused on defining a collaborative 3D modeling platform for large engineering and manufacturing organizations. Prospective customers and target accounts included companies such as Rockwell Collins, John Deere, Vermeer, and Caterpillar.
These teams worked with complex assemblies containing thousands of components. Existing collaboration workflows relied on slow file transfers, static screenshots, or in-person reviews, creating bottlenecks across internal teams and external vendors.
The opportunity was to enable secure collaboration directly in the cloud, allowing teams to review, annotate, and make decisions without downloading full models locally.
This was a foundational product initiative: translating specialized CAD workflows into scalable browser-based collaboration patterns under significant technical and security constraints.
Business Stakes
The product needed to prove that complex 3D collaboration could work securely and reliably in a cloud environment. Success required demonstrating enterprise viability, reducing review bottlenecks, and building confidence among highly risk-averse engineering organizations.
Failure would reinforce skepticism around cloud-based 3D workflows and limit expansion into large manufacturing accounts.
Team
Product Management, Engineering, and domain SMEs across engineering and manufacturing.
I partnered closely with product and engineering to translate specialized CAD workflows into scalable cloud-based interaction models.
Constraints
Impact Snapshot
I served as Lead UX Designer and sole designer during the product’s first year, owning end-to-end work across discovery, interaction and system design, and delivery.
In a stealth startup environment with limited user access, I partnered closely with product and engineering to define the problem space, translate feasibility and security constraints into design direction, and establish the foundational interaction model for a cloud-based platform. As the company grew, these patterns became the basis for later product expansion and pivots.
Key Leadership Contribution: Defined the core interaction and system model enabling fast, secure, role-aware collaboration around complex 3D assemblies, aligning product, engineering, and business constraints into a shared foundation for scalable development.
This work had no clear benchmarks. In a stealth startup building a novel platform, collaboration, performance, and usability assumptions had to be tested alongside technical exploration.
I worked closely with product and engineering to make evolving constraints actionable, align the team around shared mental models, and iterate toward a solution that balanced feasibility, security, and adoption.
Engineering teams relied on complex 3D assemblies to make critical decisions, but collaboration broke down during review and feedback.
Teams shared large files through legacy tools, emailed screenshots, or relied on meetings to explain changes that were hard to reference later. Feedback lived outside the model context, forcing people to translate intent across tools and viewpoints.
The result was slower decisions, more rework, and weaker shared understanding across teams and vendors.
Most existing tools were optimized for individual authoring, not shared decision-making. Opening full assemblies was slow even on high-end machines, and stakeholders who only needed to review still had to load entire models.
Vendors and non-engineering partners often lacked access, creating bottlenecks and translation errors. Instead of enabling collaboration, the toolchain reinforced silos.
At first glance, the problem looked like missing collaboration features. Discovery showed the deeper issue was shared context. Teams needed a way to build shared understanding around complex systems without forcing everyone into the same tools, workflows, or performance constraints.
Any solution had to reconcile:
Without a new approach, decisions would remain slow, rework would increase, and sensitive data would be either overshared or withheld.
Most importantly, the barrier to enterprise adoption would stay too high for the platform to scale. This was a systemic collaboration failure limiting speed, trust, and adoption.
With limited early access to external users, discovery focused on building a shared understanding of how engineers actually collaborated around 3D models.
I worked closely with product, engineering, and an experienced design engineer SME to synthesize domain knowledge across end-to-end design and manufacturing workflows, collaboration handoffs between OEMs and suppliers, and the realities of security, performance, and tooling in enterprise environments.
This work was less about validating a single hypothesis and more about reducing risk before committing to a specific interaction model.
To move from ambiguity to direction, I facilitated a focused design sprint with product, engineering, and the SME.
The sprint helped the team:
This created alignment across disciplines and established a concrete starting point for experience design grounded in domain reality rather than assumption.
In parallel, I reviewed both direct CAD tools and adjacent collaboration paradigms to understand where existing solutions succeeded and where they fell short.
This included CAD platforms such as Inventor, Fusion 360, Onshape, JT2Go, and CADX, alongside adjacent paradigms such as PowerPoint, photo markup tools, GitHub, Basecamp, and InVision / Axure.
The goal was not to replicate CAD depth, but to understand where collaboration was being forced into tools not designed for it, which patterns were already familiar and effective, and which could be adapted safely.
This reinforced that collaboration was happening around models, not within them, often through screenshots, static documents, and disconnected conversations.
Across discovery, several insights became clear:
These findings directly shaped the interaction model and platform direction that followed.
Discovery showed the core problem was missing shared context during review and feedback.
Existing workflows forced teams to export models, capture static screenshots, and reconcile feedback across disconnected tools. That removed spatial context, slowed decisions, and increased risk, especially with external suppliers.
The strategy was to anchor collaboration to the model so discussion, context, and decisions stayed connected to the work. The goal became designing a system that supported shared understanding across roles, disciplines, and access boundaries.
Collaboration in 3D is mediated through 2D inputs, while meaning lives in a spatial environment that changes with camera angle, zoom, and orientation. There is no single stable surface, so feedback can lose intent over time.
The challenge is compounded by role differences across engineers, reviewers, and external partners. Collaboration patterns therefore had to bind 2D input to 3D context while remaining understandable across audiences and over time.
The strategy was guided by four goals:
These goals provided clear guardrails for experience design and prevented the solution from drifting toward familiar but ineffective patterns.
Working within a stealth startup environment required focus and restraint.
The strategy prioritized:
This allowed the product to move forward with clarity while remaining adaptable as technical and organizational constraints evolved.
With the strategy defined, the focus shifted to designing an experience that enabled collaboration around complex 3D assemblies without overwhelming users or compromising performance, security, or clarity.
Rather than designing isolated features, I focused on establishing a coherent interaction model for exploration, discussion, and decision-making across roles and contexts. This created a reusable framework that could support future workflows and collaboration modes without redesigning the experience from scratch.
Early design work centered on how users collaborated around models, not just how they inspected them.
The experience was structured around three core activities:
This kept interaction decisions grounded in real workflows rather than tool-centric patterns.
To support these workflows, I designed a system that separated model interaction, commentary, and narrative storytelling while keeping them tightly connected.
Key design decisions included:
This allowed teams to move fluidly between exploration and communication without duplicating effort or breaking context.
One of the most important concepts was Stories, a way to curate and communicate decisions.
Stories allowed users to:
This reduced reliance on external tools and made collaboration more accessible to non-CAD specialists while preserving engineering accuracy.
To support synchronous work, the experience included lightweight collaboration features that mirrored how teams already worked together.
These included:
The goal was not to replace meeting tools, but to make model-based collaboration faster and more precise.
Throughout execution, I iterated closely with product and engineering to balance usability, performance, and feasibility.
This included:
The result was an experience that remained responsive and understandable under heavy technical constraints.
With the core interaction model, collaboration workflows, and system structure in place, validation focused on whether the experience aligned with real-world engineering collaboration needs without disrupting existing design processes.
Validation occurred across two tracks: internal stakeholder review and external directional exposure.
Concepts and flows were reviewed iteratively with product leadership, engineering partners, and a senior design engineer SME with deep CAD and manufacturing experience.
These reviews focused on:
Feedback reinforced that the system-level approach, including snapshots, stories, markup, and role-aware collaboration, mapped well to existing workflows while reducing friction from file-based handoffs and fragmented tools. Validation led to refinements in details without changing the core interaction model.
To pressure-test early concepts outside the immediate team, selected designs were shared in facilitated sessions at mHUB with design and engineering practitioners experienced in complex systems and collaborative workflows.
These sessions provided directional validation for:
Feedback was largely affirming, with minor refinements to labeling, affordances, and interaction clarity while the foundational system structure remained intact.
Validation gave the team:
The result was a strong, extensible baseline for secure, role-aware collaboration around complex 3D assemblies.
Designing collaboration systems requires treating shared understanding as a first-class design outcome, not a byproduct of interface design.
In this environment, success depended less on visual polish and more on:
This work reinforced that durable collaboration experiences are built through system clarity, early alignment, and disciplined tradeoff decisions, especially as products scale in complexity and usage.
