“We can’t just fully gut it. so let’s just.. sorta gut it”
The gist
DroneDeploy acquired StructionSIte in late 2022 with one goal in mind - creating a big, badass, unified reality capture platform. There were a few key goals and constraints
Fix the legacy issues we already understood about each product
Bring the platforms together in a way that feels comfortable to the legacy users
Inject some love into the visual presentation (we also ran a brand project here)
There was way too many questions on this project for us to go into here, so I’ll start out with the big one I was got jumped into the project with-
Question:
How do you fuse two products in a way that makes both user bases comfortable while fixing the legacy issues each had?
My Answer? you draw a map
The biggest challenge in bringing two unique products is actually making sure you understand them. The only way for us to get anywhere was to map out everything we had to support and build a structure that would scale.
How do you actually get to “designs” for this though?
WE had something to show for it
Planning the roll-out
Like most things in the Startup world, this project didn’t happen in isolation. so a ton of the teams attention was focused on doing other projects while we built out this platform combination.
I built a design system across two files. One that represented the legacy products and the other that converted those into the final layouts & styles. That way when we were ready we could flip the switch and engineers could follow the logic we used to transform our product.
