Good communication is one of the most important aspects of an efficient and productive team. HoloBuilder allows construction teams to easily communicate issues on their projects with the markups. Marking up drawings or plans is a common practice within the construction industry, but HoloBuilder is the first platform to allow its users to use markups in a 360 environment.

I was given a week to design a way for users to manage and view all of their markups in a single area. This immediately signaled that I wouldn’t have much time for user research but I was already familiar with the mindset of users in the industry, who aren’t as up-to-date with technology as most. I was also aware of similar functionality in other construction-tech solutions, so I began by searching for some examples in other products. There was no need for me to “recreate the wheel” here, but I just had to make sure that the design was highly intuitive and allowed the users to accomplish their goals as quickly and efficiently as possible.

First iteration

The vision for the first design iteration was essentially a simple excel sheet (which was simple considering my previous role was in accounting/finance), but as I began to get more into the workflows of our users, I wanted to also add task management functionality that would allow users to be more productive and communicate more efficiently regarding issues that are marked up. Tasks are very big in construction, as there are dozens of workers, on multiple teams, from different companies that all need to reference the same issues and work together. I began to share my designs and ideas with our development team, and while most saw the value, there were several concerns. I was quickly welcomed to the realities of designing at a small startup.

“We already defined a scope. Stick to it.”
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“We don’t need design specs. We’ll just try to make it look as close to the designs as possible.”
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“The functionality is too complex for the resources we have.”

Ultimately, the design had to be simplified and we were able to agree upon operating in a more agile workflow where we released MVPs in a smaller capacity but higher frequency.

First, we released a very simple version that allowed users to:

• easily navigate to any markup in the project
• edit, sort, search, filter
• download the list as .csv

Second iteration

Almost immediately, we began to receive feedback (via several avenues: support, customer interviews, CSMs, etc.) that the markup list was a nice feature BUT it would be much more valuable if users could actually tie those markups to an individual onsite and assign a task. I mean, this was the primary use case for using markups in the industry so I wasn’t surprised.

Over months of allowing users to use the feature, we received plenty of feedback and another interesting trend began to show up in our findings. There was more information that needed to be tied to these markups and everybody wanted different fields that reflected their own individual processes and specific industries.

Again, we had to compromise and cut this second release in half. This time we’d only add the ability to assign markups to other users who had edit access on the project.

The evolution of this feature is definitely something that helped me to understand how a designer needs to balance the needs of the user with the needs of the business. While I was disappointed that we couldn’t add some functionality to this iteration, it was much easier for the team to accept the idea with user feedback to back it up and helped to open the dialog with the development team more.