Build a PaaS which helps customers turn their floor-plans into high-fidelity furnished 3D Models and virtual tours.
After long observation and research, we have defined that the expected audience of the platform: Design Technologists, Sales & Marketing Teams, Software Developers should have the possibility to digitalise floor-plans, design space from scratch, furnish the space manually or automatically, visualize the model as a visual tour and integrate any part of the process or solution into any other software.
The goal was to build the tool for supporting the digitalization process. The success points were to spend no more than 10 minutes for one floor-plan digitalization and 2 weeks for the onboarding of new employees.
For understanding the current situation, we have:
— Interviewed users (the 8 worldwide distributed teams), mapped and measured their process;
— Discovered the pain points of the process and the reasons behind them;
— Defined how we could affect the main KPI: speed, accuracy, and user engagement.
After the vision was clear, we have:
— Prototyped the main ideas: step-by-step process, visual interface, gamification, floor-plan management;
— Tested with 2 teams and compared the results;
— Pushed the prototype to production after the stable improvement of the process.
As a result:
— The user experience was keeping improving through several more releases, especially after we have A/B tested the various solutions with different teams;
— We have achieved 8 minutes digitalisation time for each floor-plan and 1 week onboarding time for each new employee;
— Due to the interface complexity, we have built a separate UI system that included hundred of elements, icons, statuses, and reactions.
The goal was to let customers turn any 3D model into a virtual tour, which could be observed through a browser or with VR CardBoard.
Here we have:
— Discovered customer needs and use cases;
— Brainstormed the list of the solutions;
— Built the optimal IA of the future tool;
— Prepared the interfaces and tested the user journey.
The goal was to let the third party developers use the platform's API for building their own solutions.
For this part, we have:
— Collected minimum requirements for developers to understand and implement our API;
— Built the informational structure of the documentation, guidelines, and examples;
— Organised all ideas into layouts;
— Prepared design for implementation.
— The platform structure and design;
— The tool for floor-plan digitalization;
— The tool for 3D model visualization;
— The custom UI system.
Moving from the service to the PaaS solution has completely changed the company's business model: it has united several different ideas into one life-cycle, extended their customer audience, and increased the market share in a segment of tools and services for 3D space visualisation. The new digitalisation process has decreased costs per model and improved accuracy. Today, the well documented and supported API keeps raising the number of products was being built on its basis.