PROJECT 14 / AEC & MANUFACTURING
Every door, lever, and finish is an order, not a suggestion
UX for specifying door hardware and custom finishes in ICE, where a lever, a hinge, and a powder coat each resolve to a real part on the factory floor.
- Role
- UX Designer
- Where
- DIRTT Environmental Solutions
- When
- 2018
- Links
- DIRTT
CONTEXT
The parts are the product
ICE turns a drawn interior into a manufactured one. The walls and glass carry the design, but a room is not buildable until the doors have levers and hinges, the hardware comes from a manufacturer with a model number, and every finish has a name and a colour. Those small specifications are where a designer's intent either survives manufacturing or quietly becomes a return.
Hardware was also where errors concentrated. A door lever is not a visual choice. It is a Schlage model, a hinge grade, a lock function, and a finish, and any one of them wrong means a physical object arriving wrong on site.
SCOPE
What I worked on across the specification workflow.
- Door hardware specification: levers, hinges, and locksets, with manufacturer, model, and compatibility surfaced
- A custom library for components and finishes, so custom items persist across projects
- A new custom item wizard with conditional fields that load from the selected item type
- A custom finish editor and component catalog management
- Library linking and merging, with conflict management when two libraries diverge
KEY DECISIONS
HARDWARE IS CHOSEN, NOT TYPED
Tension
A free-text field for a model number invites transposition errors, and there is no reviewer downstream who knows the Schlage catalog well enough to catch one.
Decision
Ran hardware selection through a structured catalog: hardware type, then manufacturer, then model, with compatibility surfaced alongside the choice.
Tradeoff
Building and maintaining that catalog is real work, and it only covers what is in it. Free text is faster to build and wrong more often, in ways that are expensive to discover.
A CUSTOM ITEM IS A FIRST-CLASS OBJECT
Tension
Custom finishes and components tended to live in a single project and vanish when the designer moved to the next, so the same powder coat got recreated by hand, slightly differently, every time.
Decision
Made custom items first-class objects with their own editor and a library that links and merges across files, with explicit conflict management when one name carries two definitions.
Tradeoff
A library carries its own complexity: link, merge, and conflict dialogs are the tax on never re-entering an item. The payoff is consistency across projects, not a cleaner single screen.
OUTCOME
Hardware and finish specification moved out of the probably-right zone and into the exactly-what-gets-manufactured zone. I am deliberately not attaching a percentage to it. The improvement is real, and the figure I was once given for it is not one I can source, so it stays qualitative.
GALLERY