PROJECT 15 / AEC & MANUFACTURING
The wall ships ready for whatever hangs on it
UX for specifying blocking in ICE, the internal anchorage that lets a DIRTT wall carry a television, a handrail, or a grab bar, placed and sized before the panel is manufactured.
- Role
- UX Designer
- Where
- DIRTT Environmental Solutions
- When
- 2018
CONTEXT
What mounts to the wall has to live inside the wall
A prefabricated wall is built to order, so the reinforcement for anything that will hang on it has to be specified at design time. Blocking is the structural anchorage built into the panel, and it carries the things people actually use a wall for: a television, a handrail, a grab bar, a shelf. Get it wrong and the wall arrives on site unable to hold what the client planned to mount.
This was a research-driven redesign, not a restyle. It started from how installers and designers actually think about mounting, and the design had to make a spatial decision, where the blocking goes and how much it carries, feel like a design decision rather than a structural calculation.
SCOPE
What the project covered.
- A research phase: competitive analysis, personas, empathy mapping, user journey mapping, and card sorting
- A how-might-we framing and a design proposal grounded in the research
- Information architecture for the blocking specification flow
- An add-blocking workflow with size and load options, from light to heavy duty
- A context-menu path, settings, and a specification surface for the chosen blocking
KEY DECISIONS
BLOCKING IS PLACED ON THE WALL, NOT LISTED BESIDE IT
Tension
Anchorage is spatial. A list of blocking elements in a side panel asks the designer to hold the wall in their head while matching list entries to positions, which is exactly how a mount lands on the wrong panel.
Decision
Placed blocking in the model where the object mounts, so the reinforcement and the thing it carries are the same interaction.
Tradeoff
In-context placement is more work to build than a list, and it competes with everything else on the wall. The justification is that a misplaced mount is a manufactured error, not a cosmetic one.
MAKE THE LOAD LEGIBLE, NOT JUST THE SIZE
Tension
Blocking comes in sizes, and size alone does not tell a designer whether a given reinforcement will hold a monitor or a grab bar. Asking them to know the difference is asking for a wrong call.
Decision
Surfaced the load class alongside the size, so the choice reads as what it is for rather than as an engineering dimension.
Tradeoff
More labels and states to design and maintain. The cost is interface complexity; the payoff is that the designer picks the right anchorage the first time.
WHAT CHANGED
The research shifted the framing before the design did.
FROM WHAT INSTALLERS FIX TO WHAT DESIGNERS PLACE
Feedback
Research surfaced that blocking was mostly met as a mistake: installers discovered a missing or undersized anchorage on site and had to fix it.
Learning
The problem was not the blocking itself. Designers never saw it as their responsibility because the tool never showed them the consequence of leaving it out.
Change
Made blocking a first-class part of the design surface, placed where the mount goes, so it is specified upstream where it costs nothing rather than fixed downstream where it costs a visit.
OUTCOME
The redesign moved blocking from an on-site afterthought to a design-time decision, with the research to back the direction. I am not attaching a figure to it. A wall that ships ready for what will hang on it is the outcome, not a percentage.
GALLERY