Quality & Compliance Traceability for Underfloor Insulation

A platform that outgrew its structure

The platform supports the management of underfloor insulation surveys and installations across distributed field teams.

Over time, it evolved without a coherent design system or information architecture. As a result:

• User experience became inconsistent
• Core workflows required unnecessary navigation
• The platform became increasingly difficult to scale and maintain

Alongside a backend migration, we redesigned the frontend to improve usability, scalability and accessibility across the system.

Structure out of step with real use

The platform had evolved around the product's underlying structure rather than the way people worked. Technicians in the field and project managers coordinating surveys were funnelled through the same screens, navigating around features they didn't need to reach the information they did.

As the product grew, that disconnect became increasingly costly:

• Workflows fragmented across multiple screens
• Critical information buried behind unnecessary navigationn
• Redundant features adding complexity for every user
• Long loading times slowing day-to-day tasks

The result was a platform that became harder to use, maintain and extend as the business scaled.

Focusing on two user groups

To support a shift in market positioning, I defined two primary user groups with distinct but overlapping needs:

• Project Managers: coordinating surveys and installations
• Technicians: executing work in the field

This helped prioritise essential system capabilities and define a clearer structural foundation, including:

• Key system entry points (e.g. property listing and property pages)
• Enabling features such as deep linking across workflows

Designing for scalability and clarity

The design approach focused on simplifying complexity while ensuring the system could scale with new use cases. This included:

• Creation and evolution of a design system to support consistency and scalability
• Iterative exploration through low-fidelity wireframes
• Benchmarking patterns from established products (e.g. search and navigation systems)
• Continuous validation with operational users
• Close collaboration with engineering to align on technical constraints

Property page, the core operational interface

The Property Page is a critical point in the system, used to access and manage all project-related information. The original interface had evolved incrementally, resulting in:

• High interaction cost
• Poor information hierarchy
• Limited scalability as new features were added

Key improvements included:

• Removing low-value features to reduce cognitive load
• Grouping high-frequency information for immediate access
• Introducing clearer hierarchy and separation of data (property vs customer)
• Adding contextual elements (e.g. property image, client name) to support orientation in the field
• Designing scalable navigation (including vertical secondary navigation) to accommodate growing system complexity

Instant access from the CRM

Property pages couldn't be accessed directly. To open one, the team had to start from the homepage and search for the property every time. By introducing stable URLs, we made each property page linkable from the CRM the team already used, reducing access from four steps to one.

A platform that scales

The restructure changed how teams access and work with project data. The most visible improvement was in the highest-frequency task: opening a property from the CRM. What had previously required four steps could now be done in a single click through deep-linkable property URLs.

• High-frequency information was grouped for immediate access, reducing time spent searching across screens
• Property and customer data were separated into a clearer hierarchy, reducing the risk of errors
• Met WCAG AA contrast (AAA on key text) and clarified page navigation, improving legibility and accessibility
• Property and customer data were separated into a clearer hierarchy, reducing the risk of errors

The platform is now deployed across distributed field teams, supporting underfloor insulation projects at scale.

The most interesting challenge was to create and integrate a new design system to scale the platform without redesigning it entirely. — Key takeaway