Room Planner

Strategic Product Leadership & Cross-Functional Coordination

Role: Product Design Lead & Project Strategist
Context: B2B/B2C Web & Mobile, seamless e-commerce integration

🧠 The Challenge

The 3D Room Planner serves as 3D Cloud’s flagship application, utilised daily by design professionals and consumers through major retail clients like B&Q. From the outset, I led cross-functional initiatives to interpret live behavioral data, stakeholder insights, and analytics—all revealing critical bottlenecks:

  • Navigation inefficiencies were slowing user task completion and raising cognitive load.

  • Lengthy onset times—averaging 26 minutes to the first effective action—were impairing conversion and onboarding.

  • Complex UI escalated digital training demands, increased drop-off, and raised operational strain for partner teams.

⚽️ Strategic Goal

Redesign the navigation and UI to reduce time-to-first-action, increase sales conversions, and make the product scalable across brands—without alienating trained power users.

🎯 Design Objectives

Simplify and modernise UI/UX to reduce cognitive load.

Enhance discoverability of core features and speed up room planning workflows.

Ensure brand-level customisation via a shared design system.

Deliver measurable improvements in conversion and retention.

Just for context

Here is a live example of the application deployed for B&Q (taken 12.07.2024). A UK home retail customer that has professional designers that are trained on it’s use as well as providing direct customer access via their e-commerce platform.

✍🏼Wireframes

🧭 My Project Leadership Approach

📑 Strategic Planning & Scoping

I led project kick-off sessions with Product and Development leadership, refining commercial priorities and defining success metrics—balancing speed, scalability, and brand flexibility.

🫱🏼‍🫲🏼 Multi-Stakeholder Co-Creation

I led project kick-off sessions with Product and Development leadership, refining commercial priorities and defining success metrics—balancing speed, scalability, and brand flexibility.

📊 Data-Informed Design Strategy

Deep-dived into usage funnels via Google Analytics to surface drop-off nodes and conversion friction. Synthesised these findings with competitor audits (e.g., IKEA, Planner 5D) to inform navigation and design direction.

📔 Cross-Functional Asset Alignment & Scalability

Led reusability and design system assessments, working across UX, UI, and development teams to foster modularity and support brand-level customization—preserving both efficiency and consistency.

🧪 Prototype Validation & Decision-Making

Directed multiple navigation prototypes through unmoderated quantitative testing with both internal and external user cohorts. Evaluated trade-offs between minimal retraining and maximal UX improvement, guiding the team toward the most compelling design.

📤Takeaways

  • Top Bar Navigation: Users were able to find everything they needed in the new top bar.

  • Initial Confusion, Quick Adoption: Some users found top bar navigation switching confusing at first but quickly adapted and appreciated the improved speed.

  • Improved Workspace: Users liked the collapsible menu for maximizing 3D design space.

  • Mobile Experience Needs Guidance: The mobile version caters to consumers and should guide users step-by-step through the design process.

  • Advanced Search Challenges: Users want better search and filtering, but implementing this is complex due to each customer owning a unique data structure.

🎨 Final Design

Mobile Design

Mobile design taken to its own separate project as it was found that it would need a more hands on approach when it comes to guidance. This can be shown if you decide to invite me to interview.

✨ Key Design Solutions

Area

Solution

Impact

Top-tab action bar to streamline access to key workflows

Navigation

+30% faster nav performance

Show/hide menus to prioritise 3D canvas space

Menus

Reduced visual clutter

Smart filters & contextual search

Search

Improved product findability

Modular components, customisable per brand

Design System

Increased scalability, faster rollout

📈 Project Outcomes & Client Impact

Metric

Result

⏱️ Reduced task initiation time—time-to-first-product placement dropped by 7 minutes, which directly elevated user engagement.

↓ 7 minutes

🛒 Enhanced commercial performance—average cart value increased by 14%; dropout during planning stages decreased by 65%.

↑ Value 14%

↓ Drop out 65%

💰 Accelerated adoption & conversion—sales rose by 6% within six months, underscoring the business impact of streamlined UX and efficient rollout.

↑ 6%

🔄 What I Learned

  • Training friction is real: While users verbally preferred a bold UI change, they pragmatically chose minimal retraining paths.

  • Mobile ≠ Desktop: Professional users rejected mobile workflows entirely, leading to a pivot—mobile UX is now being designed specifically for consumer onboarding and handholding.

  • Search ≠ Universal: Each client owns their own taxonomy, making scalable smart search challenging without foundational data restructuring.

🧠 Strategic Takeaway

Balancing innovation with legacy constraints is key when designing enterprise-grade tools. Given another opportunity, I’d push for dual-design pathways:

  • Incremental version for ease of adoption

  • Visionary version to demonstrate full UX potential and reduce training dependency entirely.