Buildsys UX & design
Company
Buildsys co.
My Role
UX Research, Information Architecture, Navigation Concepts, UX Design, Hi-fi Mockups, Interaction Design, Design System, Project Management
Tools
Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Paper & Sharpie
Duration
2 yrs approx
Year
2019-2020
How do you design technology for first-time tech users who are in chaotic environments with a million things happening around them?
Construction is one of the most underserved industries in terms of technology being the second least digitized industry after agriculture in the world.
Over 80% of construction projects go over budget and over 20% get delayed.
Research Questions
To understand the context, I along with my design team conducted 1:1 ethnographic interviews, secondary research and site observations.
How is a drawing involved in the overall construction lifecycle?
How is the drawing developed and who are the key stakeholders involved?
How does the drawing go from the architects' office to the construction site?
What are the timelines and mediums of communication?
Research Findings
-
Drawings are one of the most important mediums of collaboration throughout the entire construction lifecycle as they define the scope of work from planning to execution.
-
Currently, drawings are exchanged as physical copies, sent over email and chat, planned on Excel, and shared via cloud storage.
Drawings serve as the mode of communication from 'planning' to 'Execution' phase of the construction lifecycle.
-
All project stakeholders such as architects, design consultants, project managers, owners, contractors and site engineers collaborate over drawings.
All project stakeholders collaborate over drawings.
-
Architects develop architectural drawings; various engineering consultants such as (Civil, Structural, MEP etc) work on top of these architectural drawings to develop structural drawings, plumbing, electrical and fire drawings.
Snippet from their planning document on excel showing different types of drawings
-
Drawings come in different stages such as Concept Development, Design Development, Sanction and Good For Construction (GFC).
Drawings come in different stages throughout the project.
-
Any modifications or design changes lead to revisions. Each drawing often goes through multiple revisions at each stage of the project.
Revision Number
Title block example that is there on every drawing sheet.
-
Drawings are completed and shared in phases. (unique to Indian construction)
-
Drawing schedules are created to keep track of all of these on spreadsheets.
.webp)
Snippet of a drawing schedule (Excel).
.webp)
-
Drawings are distributed as printed paper sets for reference on the site.
-
These can take from 2-7 days to reach from office to the site.
Drawing sets are physically sent to the site.
-
Drawings are also stored on cloud storage and shared with various consultants for collaboration.
.webp)
Drawings are hiding within folders that are often categorized by stage.
Framing Insights
-
After interviewing architects, project management companies, real estate developers, contractors and various consultants, we analysed our research using insight sorting,
-
made user observation database on OneNote.
-
made user personas for all the stakeholders involved.
-
made current user journeys and user scenarios for the drawings module
-
-
This helped us come up with our informed design principles for all our future modules and helped us define the areas of opportunities for the drawings module.
Insight Sorting from various ethnographic interviews.
Developing current user personas for various stakeholders.
Current user journeys for drawings: stakeholders involved, medium of communication, differnt stages and time.
Current user journeys for drawings: stakeholders involved, medium of communication, differnt stages and time.
Opportunities
Tracking
-
Construction schedules are linked to drawing schedules, any delays or changes can set a project back by several weeks.
-
Contractors and project managers need to track the status of drawings and ensure everyone is working off of the latest revision.
Version Control
-
Rework or delays on site due to someone working off of an older revision is one of the most common and avoidable pain points.
-
Notifying stakeholders about the latest revisions and distributing new printed sets of drawings is slow and tedious; and requires book-keeping at both the site and office.
Accessibility
-
Printed drawings are checked out and carried from trailers to the site.
-
Staff has to create copies of drawings to markup, make quick measurements or raise RFIs (Request for Information).
-
Multiple channels of communication like email, Whatsapp, paper documents, meeting minutes etc.
Personas
Project Manager
I want to be able to able to keep track of the drawing status, follow up easily on overdue drawings and maintain ultimate visibility of all the changes and communication.
_edited.jpg)
Site Engineer
I often have questions about drawing contents and need a fast and reliable way to receive answers and clarifications.
Architect
I want to be able to access all drawings with revisions, capture feedback and markup drawings for associated changes.
Contractor
I want to execute with confidence, not rework. I want to ensure my team always
has the most up-to-dated drawings
and specifications.
Opportunity mind mapping
We benchmarked existing software solutions for construction drawing management such as Procore, Bullclip and Bluebeam Revu.
We also looked at popular design management tools such as Adobe XD from orthogonal industries.
Benchmarking existing solutions available
globally.
Bullclip drawing viewer
luebeam Revu highlighter tool
Drawing viewer on Procore Web
Bullclip rectangle markup tool
Drawing master set on Bluebeam Revu
Procore drawing viewer toolbar menu
Breakthroughs & Innovations
After a deep understanding of our user's journey, we identified three main gaps that were unique to the Indian context.
These gaps could be understood only by seeing things in context and we jumped in joy when we were able to solve these gaps!
They ended up being the most convincing and unique features that save our users tons of time and money!
I need to know that I am working from the latest drawing set to avoid rework.
In order to satisfy this use case, we designed a system to generate a unique QR code for every drawing sheet on Buildsys.
So for example, an engineer on the site now takes out his phone, scans the QR code on the drawing sheet, and the Buildsys app immediately tells him if the drawing is the latest revision or if it has been superseded.
Impact:
This saves them time, avoids rework and helps them build with confidence.
Wait! Why is there a drawing schedule and why are all the drawings hiding with multiple levels of folders on a separate cloud storage?
We noticed two very cumbersome activities:
-
Maintaining a drawing schedule, coordinating and following up with architects and consultants about scheduled drawings and keeping track of all the revisions.
-
Keeping all the drawings arranged in cloud storage and making sure only the latest is available for use- this meant searching for drawings within multiple folders and also going and deleting older revisions.
We combined the two into a unified interface and this is one of the most loved features on Buildsys.
Impact:
This makes access to drawings easier and simpler
I have to export all my drawings as separate PDF which is really painful since we typically have 30-100 drawings in a set.
We saw the user manually entered long drawing codes and numbers for each and every drawing. We noticed that title blocks on all drawings in a set are the same.
We let the user manually scan one title block for OCR (optical character recognition) and it does the rest of the work for you. We further made this process more visual for a quick scan for correctness by the user and 100s of drawings can be uploaded at the same time for a single PDF.
Impact:
It prevents human error and makes the process faster.
Before: Master Drawing Schedule
When the project manager looked at the drawings schedule for the first time, they had not seen something like this before. They opened the app and went - ‘Oh yeah! This will work!’ It was a moment of joy.
On further testing and observation, we noticed that while it worked great as a master schedule for folks in the office, it still took many steps to find the drawing at the site.
After: Master Drawing Schedule
We quickly addressed this by building a very robust search and filtering system that simplified the product architecture, hierarchy and terminology so that the correct drawing sheets and product information would be no more than two clicks away.
Presenting the Buildsys Drawings Module!
Drawings
Meetings
Tasks
Files and Photos
RFIs
Track entire submittal history and view past revisions
Track entire submittal history and view past revisions
Submittals
As a UX Designer, I was involved in many other aspects of the business such as strategy, market positioning, sales, marketing and driving adoption.
You may also like
