ASV prototype shown in a production setting. Illustrative composite.
Context and my role
Senior UX Product Designer · Sole designer · April 2026–present
As the sole designer for Assembly Station View, I’m creating a workspace for truss assembly crews to view drawings, access queued work, and record progress. It’s part of CS Producer, Simpson Strong-Tie’s manufacturing production software.
I partnered with Product, Engineering, QA, and UX Research, drawing on discovery research conducted by a UX researcher. I spoke directly with customers to understand their information needs and gather feedback on the prototype. My responsibilities included prioritization, interaction design, functional prototyping, and implementation guidance.
The problem
ASV needed to support different ways of working across plants, each with its own equipment and production practices. On a projector or shared monitor, the drawing and essential information had to remain visible without interaction. At the same time, people using touchscreens or computers needed to access supporting details, record partial progress, and move between jobs. With no time in the MVP to build separate views for each setup, I had to reconcile these needs in one interface: readable from a distance, useful as a static reference, and interactive when the work required it.
Interviews with three customer organizations helped clarify the difference between engineering information and what crews needed during assembly. The challenge was to connect the drawing to the work happening at the station.
Prioritize information for building
Crews worked from paper printouts containing information for everyone involved with a truss, including engineering, estimating, and assembly. Moving that information onto a shared screen required deciding what assembly crews actually needed. I spoke with customers to understand and rate those information needs, then mapped each field to the central drawing, header, supporting panels, or outside the assembly view.
An excerpt from the data requirements matrix shows how information priorities informed placement in the drawing, header, supporting panels, or outside the assembly view.
Exploring the assembly workspace
I explored how the drawing, task navigation, piece information, and station states could work together as one assembly workspace. The canvas captures alternatives across those interactions, rather than a single finished flow.
The broader design exploration spans drawing interactions, information displays, and station states.
Decisions that shaped the design
Keep the drawing visible while providing access to queued work
The drawing needed to remain useful as a shared, static reference, while people interacting with ASV needed access to the station’s queue. The Assembly Tasks panel brings that queue alongside the drawing, allowing users to review upcoming work without leaving the assembly workspace.
In this MVP prototype, the Assembly Tasks panel provides access to queued work alongside the static SVG truss drawing.
Record the work completed within a shift
A customer described work being credited to the wrong shift because crews couldn’t record partial progress on a set of trusses at the end of their shift.
I designed completion options for one unit, a specific quantity, or the full quantity of a truss type. Crews could use their usual method while recording partial progress at breaks and shift changes. I also designed Undo to address accidental entries, working with engineering to clarify the supporting requirements.
The Done menu offers quantity-based completion and a choice of default completion behavior. Undo Last is shown disabled before any progress is recorded.
Make transitions between jobs deliberate
Customers challenged automatic progression to the next drawing. Crews needed to recognize that one job had ended and prepare the lumber or table setup for the next.
I designed explicit completion and next-group states. In the proposed flow for newly assigned work, the station signals that work is ready and the worker selects Start before the drawing loads.
Later prototype revisions addressed paused work, empty queues, and work changed elsewhere in Scheduler, making interruptions and next steps explicit.
I used full-screen color to distinguish station states: green for a completed production group, yellow for paused work, and red when the station had no work queued. The intent was to make changes noticeable across the floor, with large messages, icons, and actions explaining the state up close. When new work arrives, the red warning clears to a white ready screen, but the drawing waits for the worker to select Start.
Color, clear messages, and actions distinguish paused work, completed production groups, an empty queue, and work ready to start. Displayed figures are example data.
Scope the MVP around implementation constraints
The enhanced drawing design used colored piece and plate labels, custom fonts, and distinct styles to differentiate measurements. There wasn’t enough time to implement overlapping-element detection, so we reduced the MVP scope to a static SVG drawing. We retained the enhanced treatment for post-MVP development.
Enhanced post-MVP design with colored piece-label pills and plate details. The MVP uses a static SVG drawing because overlapping-element detection could not be implemented within the available time.
Making the design actionable
I used Claude to develop a functional prototype with requirements and review scenarios alongside the interface. AI helped generate and revise the prototype and documentation; I directed the interaction changes, reviewed scenarios, and used issues and questions to guide revisions. For completion alone, the scenarios covered invalid quantities, Undo, and finishing a set or production group. Separating work in progress from approved prototype versions gave engineering a defined reference while I continued exploring alternatives.
The AI-assisted workspace brings the functional prototype, review scenarios, and requirements together. Shown here: quantity validation.
Implementation is ongoing. Images show design concepts and prototypes; individual interactions are at different stages of implementation.
