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SUMMARY
Role: Lead Interaction & Product Designer
Cross-Functional Partners: Lead Software Engineers, Product Managers, Hardware
Platform & Scope: iPadOS Native App / Spatial 3D Reality Capture Platform
Impact: Reduced autonomous flight setup time by 40%, eliminated critical pilot errors during 3D capture missions, and established a unified design token architecture across the suite.
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Problem
The UX Challenge: Apply user-centered design methods to transform a highly technical, expert-only task into an intuitive, easy-to-use experience: letting non-expert users (architects, surveyors, field engineers) safely execute autonomous flight, monitor real-time 3D capture, and manage post-processing entirely from a tablet
Current State: Traditional 3D reality capture required specialized survey knowledge, high-risk manual controls, and multi-tool workflows—creating high barriers to entry for field operators.
Cross-Functional Strategy
1. Research-driven Insights: Conducted contextual inquiry interviews with architects, surveyors, and field drone operators. Identified that high cognitive overload occurred during real-time telemetry tracking and emergency landing decisions.
2. Positive Guidelines & Team Alignment: Partnered with engineering to establish system-wide interaction rules. Rather than restricting feature scopes, guidelines were designed so each cross-functional team defined its specific edge-case error states, streamlining cross-team handoffs.
3. Technical Constraints & Trade-Offs: Worked within strict real-time video rendering latency constraints. Redesigned HUD overlays to prioritize essential spatial metrics over non-critical UI elements during active flight mode.
Design process
Research and design ran in two-week cycles alongside the hardware and firmware teams. Contextual interviews with architects, surveyors, and field drone operators surfaced a shared blocker: 3D capture demanded survey-level expertise and juggling multiple tools mid-field. That insight shaped an early hypothesis — collapse the workflow into three journeys instead of many scattered controls — which we tested through low-fidelity wireframes before committing to the final UI.
Research and design ran in two-week cycles alongside the hardware and firmware teams. I led contextual interviews with architects, surveyors, and field drone operators (partnering with our Leica research function where available) to surface a shared blocker of not-intuitive remote controls for BLK hardware. That insight shaped an early hypothesis, tested through low-fidelity wireframes and clickable Figma prototypes before committing to final UI.
user persona
Across every user group interviewed — architects, engineers, surveyors, and drone operators — the same tension came up: they needed the precision of professional 3D capture without the specialist training it normally requires. The redesign had to earn their trust in autonomy while still giving them a clear way to intervene when something looked wrong.
Primary persona:
The Trusted non-expert operator. Needs professional-grade 3D capture accuracy without survey-level training; wants to trust the system's autonomy but needs an obvious, low-stress way to intervene when something looks wrong.
user flow
User flows helped us identify potential problems with our product and understand the best ways for our users to interact with the application.
Consolidated complex drone navigation into 3 primary user journeys:
Plan Flight: Autonomous boundary setup and pre-flight safety checks.
Monitor & Capture: Real-time 3D point-cloud streaming with dynamic feedback overlays.
Safe Landing & Sync: One-tap landing triggers with instant local-to-cloud asset sync.
plan flights
After clicking on the 'Plan Flight' button, the main overview of the front camera will appear, allowing users to take off, initiate scanning, or access various settings necessary to begin their journey.
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Monitor & Capture
Once a scan begins, the interface shifts from setup to live feedback. Operators see the point cloud building in real time, a progress bar tracking scan completion, and overlays that flag under-scanned surfaces before the mission ends, so a gap in coverage is caught mid-flight rather than discovered back at the office.
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Safe Landing & Sync
Landing carries the highest risk in an autonomous mission, so the decision was reduced to one choice: land in place or return to home. Confirming either option triggers an automatic sync of the captured data to the cloud, removing a manual file-transfer step that previously required a separate desktop workflow.
Intuitive Tooltips for Remote Controller Mastery.
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Create projects
Effortlessly manage and organize your scans with intuitive project organization feature. Seamlessly group and categorize your scans within projects, ensuring a systematic and streamlined workflow.
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Impact & Outcomes
Task completion: Streamlined pre-flight setup time from 15 minutes down to 3 minutes.
Error Reduction: Reduced accidental mission aborts by 35% during testing through dynamic landing feedback loops.
Design System Efficiency: Standardized Leica color tokens into a centralized Figma system, cutting frontend build times across Leica Geosystems.
These results were validated through iterative usability testing with internal and external users, including Leica Geosystems field operators, product owners, and construction engineers, and directly informed the centralized Figma design token system now used to speed up frontend builds across the Leica Geosystems suite.
