Case Study
Alvic 3D Kitchen Designer
Alvic Group is one of the largest kitchen furniture manufacturers in Spain with presence in France and the US. I was hired by the folks at Folio3 as a product owner and designer to create a fully in-browser 3D kitchen designer and budget planner application. I moved to Spain for 6 months to learn about Alvic’s industrial manufacturing process and work closely with them to create the application’s features, and liaison between Alvic and Folio3’s engineering team.
Application Design
Alvic’s challenge was replacing their outdated desktop CAD system with a modern web app built in JavaScript and ThreeJS. The new system had to handle everyday complex kitchen design scenarios, be intuitive enough for users without CAD experience, and work with a catalog of over 300,000 products.
Through user research with kitchen designers and sales teams, I identified their main frustrations and designed features and interfaces to address these issues; including automating tedious manual tasks that previously required technical know-how, like configuring hardware specs based on design choices, or generating annotated floor plans.
I also wrote the technical and functional specifications for the engineering team, defining user interactions and feature logic to ensure the final product solved the workflow issues we had identified. During the alpha thesting phase I trained and supported a group of users from Alvic's team to validate the application and gather feedback for refinements.
Automatic Dimensioning
One of many complex technical challanges was designing the application’s automatic dimensioning system. Creating clearly dimensioned floor plans that can be used by architects and kitchen installation personnel is a highly technical and time consuming task, and we needed non-technical users to be able to do it. I wrote the technical and functional specifications for the engineering team, defined the plan dimensioning logic and rules, and designed all the visuals and interactions.
Icon System
01.Floor Cabinets
As part of the application UI, I designed a custom icon set based on a 24x24 pixel grid.