PDF Overlay

Role: Lead Product Designer
Company: Propeller Aero
Date: Q4 2021

PDF drawings are often the contractual source of truth on a construction site, but Propeller couldn't show them. I led the design of PDF Overlay, which lets customers lay a 2D plan over a 3D drone map, taking it from an engineering proof of concept through a beta to release.

1The problem

Customers kept asking to lay their PDF plans over the drone map.

Designs show what a site should look like, so they're how teams check progress and plan ahead. Propeller already supported 3D formats like DXF and IFC, but not PDFs, one of the most common 2D formats on site.

For years, customer success engineers had passed on requests from customers who wanted to compare their PDF plans with what the site actually looked like.

A PDF site plan with linework and annotations — A typical PDF plan

A feature request asking to upload semi-transparent, georeferenced PDFs to Propeller — One of many feature requests

2My contribution

A beta to test our assumptions, and two fixes from what customers told us.

Our engineers built a proof of concept to check a 2D file could sit inside the 3D map. It proved the tech, but not the experience. We turned it on for customers in our beta program, and I ran interviews over the quarter to test five assumptions, from uploading a single-page PDF to adjusting its transparency.

Two of them were wrong. Customers didn't know which points to pick on the PDF without the map in front of them, so I designed a split view that shows both side by side. And a see-through plan still hid the map, so I designed a double slider that fades the paper and the linework separately.

The proof of concept our beta customers tried

Marking points on a PDF without the map, and losing track of where they are — Switching between the PDF and the map lost context

A PDF overlaid on the map at the default opacity, making the map hard to read — At the default opacity, the plan hid the map

Wireframes of a split view with the PDF and the map side by side — Wireframing the split view

A double slider for the paper and the linework

Before: seven steps, locating the file and revealing actions twice. After: upload, adjust transparency, then crop, mark and overlay in one view — From seven steps to three

3The outcome

Over 135 PDFs overlaid in the first month.

Customers and dealers noticed straight away, especially the double slider. Few other tools let you make the paper transparent while keeping the linework visible.

Slack kudos for the PDF Overlay team, quoting a senior product manager at a dealer: whoever made that PDF Overlay function needs a pat on the back, that thing is awesome — Customer sentiment shared on Slack

Slack kudos quoting a customer: a big enhancement over the previous methodology, very intuitive, and accuracy seems to be spot on — Customer sentiment shared on Slack

A customer's email shared in Slack: it worked really well, this is something I didn't even know I needed, but now I sure do — Customer sentiment shared on Slack

What I learned

Writing our assumptions down before the beta made it easy to see which ones customers proved wrong.

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