4 min read

·

Aug 13, 2025

At Visibuild, I led product design for a high-impact feature addressing a critical pain point in large construction projects: managing and tracking thousands of inspection templates across multiple locations, trades, and handover stages. Working closely with PMs, engineers, QA managers, and client stakeholders, I drove this project end-to-end — from problem definition through to successful public release, balancing strategic vision with hands-on design execution.

Large constructions projects like AirTrunk involve hundreds to thousands of linked inspection templates (ITPs and ITCs). Existing tools fragmented visibility, forcing teams to juggle spreadsheets and multiple trackers just to piece together inspection progress. This led to:

Significant time lost manually reconciling inspection data

Missed or duplicated inspections risking costly rework and delays

Frustrated teams and anxious clients due to poor real-time visibility

As one coordinator at Richard Crookes put it:

Mirvac echoed this frustration:

Brady Group highlighted the risk of lost visibility when data doesn’t roll up correctly:

These quotes reveal how manual reconciliation, fragmented tools, and poor data visibility combine to create workflow friction, delays, and risk in complex inspection programs.

We ran a mixed-methods discovery process:

Only 5.34% of users exported inspection data weekly, ranging from single exports to over 10,000 rows at a time

Export sizes typically involved thousands of rows, requiring manual reconciliation taking anywhere between 1 to 4 hours per project

Coordinators expressed a need for saved views to avoid rebuilding complex filters every session

Project managers needed quick, high-level grouping by status, trade, or location for accurate, timely reporting without deep dives

Tools like Procore offered filtering but lacked persistent saved views and flexible grouping, leaving a clear opportunity to differentiate

Technical: Database query performance suffered when handling or filtering datasets exceeding 100,000 records, necessitating backend optimisation

Timeline: A Q3 release was essential to align with enterprise renewal cycles and support the sales pipeline

Adoption risk: Coordinators had deeply entrenched Excel-based workflows and needed demonstrable time savings to switch tools

Product scope: Saved views were a new feature concept for our team; to meet the release deadline, views were implemented as company-shared without user-specific permissions

Usage patterns: Only a small percentage of users exported data weekly, but with large export sizes and significant manual reconciliation time, underscoring the urgent need for improved in-product filtering and views

To address these challenges, I:

Conducted user interviews and surveys with coordinators, PMs, and QA managers to deeply understand workflows and pain points

Mapped user outcomes focused on noise reduction, early gap detection, and confident program-level reporting

Benchmarked competitor platforms for best practices in filtering, grouping, and saved views

Collaborated closely with engineering to surface and work around technical performance constraints

Ran iterative design workshops and usability testing sessions to validate concepts and refine interaction models

Used Google Sheets as a rapid prototyping tool to design and test matrix layouts and interactions quickly — since traditional design tools like Figma aren’t well suited for complex data tables and needed fast iteration

We designed the inspection matrix into a live, bird’s-eye view of inspection templates, featuring:

Robust, multi-dimensional filtering by location, trade, company, and template to cut through noise

Grouping and condensation tailored to roles , coordinators, PMs, QA managers, and clients, so each user sees what matters most

Clear visual status indicators for missing, due soon, overdue, or incomplete inspections

Direct links to detailed inspections, reducing the need for tool-switching

This transformed the matrix into a single source of truth, eliminating spreadsheet chaos and manual reconciliation.

Early beta testing with key clients showed:

A reduction in coordinators exporting and manually reconciling inspection data, supported by qualitative feedback that the new feature eliminated their need to export

Increased confidence from project managers in reporting program-level progress, reducing last-minute surprises at handover

Positive feedback on usability and clarity, with high adoption among large project teams

Users immediately recognised the value and ease of the new multi-template tracker:

This early love confirmed that the design met user needs and set a strong foundation for wider rollout.

Partnered cross-functionally with PMs, engineers, QA, and clients throughout the product lifecycle

Balanced technical constraints with user needs to deliver performant, intuitive UI at scale

Learned the critical importance of aligning views and interactions to user mental models and workflows

Realised simplifying complexity requires thoughtful information architecture and interaction design as much as visual polish

Continue iterating based on user feedback, focusing on saved views, notifications, and reporting features

Explore AI-driven insights to proactively highlight inspection risks and anomalies

Expand role-based customisation to empower all project roles with relevant, actionable data