Project Summary
A Project Health Dashboard for Construction Teams
🧭 Project Overview
Project Summary was a new initiative to help construction project teams understand project health at a glance before diving into dense 3D scan comparisons and issue lists.
Avvir’s core product could detect deviations and clashes from 3D reality capture, but customers were often overwhelmed by the volume and detail. I led the strategy and design of a new project-level overview experience intended to become the default entry point for monitoring progress, surfacing risk, and supporting clearer communication with owners and executives.
My role: Senior Product Designer (strategy, UX, UI, prototyping, alignment)
Primary users: 👷🏻♂️ Project Managers, 👨🏻💻 VDC Managers
Secondary users: 👨🏼💼 Project Executives / Owners
What I shipped (concept + design): a project landing experience that unified quality, progress, and cost signals, and set the foundation for future modules like inspection reporting.
🎥 Product in Action
A project-level overview that helps construction teams quickly interpret project health and identify risk before diving into detailed scan analysis.
🧩 The Challenge
The current state of construction project monitoring tools tends to prioritize technical workflows: detailed model viewers, scan comparisons, and long issue lists.
This works for VDC specialists doing deep analysis, but it leaves Project Managers and Executives without a fast way to answer basic questions like:
• What’s the current health of this project?
• Where should we focus attention this week?
• How do I communicate this clearly to owners and leadership?
Because of that gap, teams often fell back on manual reporting such as spreadsheets, weekly summaries, and verbal briefings. This created extra effort and increased the risk of missed issues.
What the Existing Experience Looked Like
When users logged into Avvir, they landed directly in a detailed 3D scan comparison viewer showing a single area of the building.
From there they could see:
• thousands of deviation highlights
• long lists of issues detected from scan comparisons
• detailed BIM model overlays
While powerful for deep analysis, this experience made it difficult for many users to quickly answer basic project questions such as:
• Is the project on track?
• Where are the biggest issues right now?
• Which areas of the building need attention?
Instead of starting with project context, users were dropped directly into low-level technical detail.
This made it harder for teams to quickly interpret project health or communicate status to stakeholders.
💡 The Opportunity
There was an opportunity to create a project-level experience that helps teams:
• orient quickly to project status
• prioritize risk across a building (not just a single scanned area)
• communicate clearly in weekly coordination meetings
The aim wasn’t to replace technical analysis. Instead, the goal was to make it more usable by ensuring people could start from the right altitude: project health → risk signals → drill into details.
🔍 Research & Insights
We anchored the initiative on three user perspectives:
👷🏻♂️ Project Managers
They coordinate trades, manage schedule and budget risk, and need meeting-ready clarity. Their workflow often starts with: “What changed this week?”
👨🏻💻 VDC Managers
They work directly with BIM and scan comparisons and need a way to separate signal from noise: “Which deviations actually matter?”
👨🏼💼 Executives / Owners
They want high-level risk signals to support decisions and reduce surprises: “Which project is trending toward cost or schedule failure?”
Across these groups, the consistent insight was that raw scan results alone were not enough.
Customers needed a clearer way to interpret project status and translate technical findings into shared understanding, particularly for weekly coordination meetings and owner-facing conversations.
Key Insight
Users did not need more issue data. They needed a faster way to interpret project health before diving into technical analysis.
Across interviews and internal discussions, a consistent pattern emerged:
• VDC managers could analyze scan results, but translating them into clear insights for project teams required additional effort.
• Project managers needed to understand where problems existed across the building, not just within a single scanned area.
• Executives wanted high-level signals indicating whether a project was trending toward risk.
This suggested an opportunity to design a project-level overview that surfaces meaningful signals first, then allows users to drill into technical detail when needed.
✏️ Design Process
To explore the opportunity, I framed the work using a Lean UX approach, aligning product strategy, user needs, and measurable outcomes before designing solutions.
The process unfolded in three stages:
1. Clarifying the Business Problem
We mapped the problem space around a core insight:
Construction monitoring tools surface large volumes of technical data, but they rarely help teams quickly understand project health at a glance.
This created a disconnect between:
• technical analysis tools used by VDC teams
• decision-making workflows used by project managers and executives
Using the Lean UX Canvas helped align the team around:
• the business problem
• measurable business outcomes
• clearly defined target users
2. Understanding User Workflows
We examined how three key roles interact with construction data:
👷️ Project Managers
• track schedule, budget, and risk
• prepare updates for coordination meetings
• identify areas requiring attention
👨🏻💻 VDC Managers
• analyze scan comparisons
• detect deviations between the built environment and design models
• communicate findings to project teams
👨🏼💼 Project Executives
• monitor project health across multiple projects
• focus on financial risk and schedule performance
• rely on summarized reports rather than technical analysis tools
Across all roles, a common theme emerged:
Users needed faster situational awareness before diving into technical analysis.
3. Hypothesis-Driven Design
Using Lean UX, we framed a set of hypotheses about what would create value.
For example:
If project managers could quickly see project health signals across the building, they would identify risks earlier and enter coordination meetings better prepared.
This helped us prioritize design directions around:
• project-level visibility
• spatial context
• clear risk signals
Rather than starting with detailed issue lists, we focused on creating a project entry point that surfaces meaningful signals first.
⚙️ Collaboration & Leadership
As the Senior Product Designer, I led the initiative across product and engineering stakeholders.
My responsibilities included:
• defining the problem framing
• synthesizing user insights
• creating the concept and interaction model
• presenting the vision to the broader team
The concept was introduced internally through a design presentation that explored how a project-level overview could become the new landing experience for Avvir projects.
The proposal resonated strongly because it addressed a recurring customer pain point:
Teams were already using Avvir data to produce manual summaries.
This experience aimed to generate those insights directly inside the product.
✅ The Solution (at a glance)
Product Strategy
Project Summary reframes how users interact with Avvir’s data by introducing a project-level interpretation layer between raw scan data and decision making.
Project Summary became the new landing experience for construction projects, designed to help teams quickly understand project health before diving into detailed scan analysis.
This overview layer helps teams quickly understand project health and risk signals before moving into detailed scan comparisons
The experience combined several key elements:
Project Health Overview
A centralized dashboard summarizing the current state of the project.
Key signals include:
• clash counts
• deviation counts
• trade build accuracy
• cost signals
• overall progress indicators
This allows teams to quickly answer:
“Is the project healthy right now?”
Building-Level Progress Visualization
An interactive 3D building view displays progress and issues across floors.
The building visualization was designed to mirror how construction teams mentally model projects.
Instead of thinking about issues as abstract lists, teams often think spatially:
• by floor
• by area
• by trade working in that area
Providing a building-level visualization allowed users to quickly see where problems were emerging across the project, making it easier to prioritize attention before diving into detailed issue analysis.
This spatial context helps users quickly identify:
• where issues exist
• which areas require attention
• how problems are distributed across the building
Instead of scanning long issue lists, teams can see where problems exist immediately.
Trade Build Accuracy
Performance indicators summarize how accurately each trade’s work aligns with design models.
This helps project managers quickly identify:
• which trades are performing well
• which trades may require coordination
The goal is to translate complex scan analysis into actionable signals for project teams.
Drill-Down Analysis
From the overview, users can navigate directly into deeper analysis:
• floor-level issue summaries
• detailed deviation inspection
• scan comparison tools
This follows a progressive disclosure model:
Users start with clarity, then move into detail only when needed.
📊 Impact
Project Summary reframed how construction teams interact with Avvir’s data by shifting the experience from issue-level analysis to project-level understanding.
Instead of starting with detailed scan comparisons, users could begin by quickly assessing project health and identifying areas that required attention.
This positioned Avvir not just as a technical analysis tool, but as a decision-support system for project teams.
The concept introduced several strategic advantages:
1. Faster situational awareness
Project teams could understand project status in seconds rather than navigating multiple reports.
2. Clearer communication across stakeholders
The overview created a shared reference point for discussions between:
• 👨🏻💻 VDC teams
• 👷🏻♂️ project managers
• 👨🏼💼 executives and owners
3. A foundation for future features
The experience also created a home for additional capabilities, such as inspection reporting and project documentation, within a unified project overview.
🧠 Reflection
This project reinforced an important lesson about enterprise software design:
Many enterprise tools generate enormous amounts of data but provide limited support for helping users interpret that data quickly enough to make decisions.
By focusing the experience on project health and risk signals, the design made complex technical information more accessible to the broader set of stakeholders responsible for delivering a project.
More broadly, the project demonstrated the value of combining:
• Lean UX product thinking
• clear information hierarchy
• spatial data visualization
to turn complex datasets into actionable insight.