Building a 3D scanning tool for heat loss surveys

Designing a mobile app that compressed a days-long on-site process into 30 minutes

Industry

Climate Tech

Function

Energy & Climate

Role

Senior Product Designer (founding)

Year

2024

Contextual CTAs

Overview / Brief

Room by Room capture

An on-site heat loss calculation depends on complete data. Every wall, window and door facing outside air. There is no partial version of the calculation: if any room is missing, the output is wrong.

The user doing this work is an installer or surveyor standing in someone's house, moving fast going from room to room, on a phone.

The problem underneath the problem

"How do we make this faster?"

That was the initial framing. But speed was not the constraint. The constraint was completeness. Every room had to be scanned because the heat loss calculation was only valid if a full floor plan was captured. That meant every design decision had to work within a non-negotiable sequential flow, for a user who was already context-switching between their physical environment and the app, and who had no tolerance for anything that felt like overhead.

What we built first

Creating reasonable shortcuts

Decision 1: The CTA as status indicator

The primary action button updates at each stage to tell the user exactly where they are and what to do next. Before anything is captured: "Scan room." Once the scan is complete: "Capture heat emitters," with an escape hatch, "No heat emitters to capture," for rooms that do not have any. Once everything is done: "Done with room."

Contextual Call to actions

Decision 2: The confirm scan screen

After every room scan, a confirm screen shows a 3D render of the captured geometry alongside a building elements breakdown: walls, doors, windows, openings, with labeled dimensions. This screen exists to let the user judge scan quality without needing to understand the underlying data model. The render is legible because it maps directly to what they just physically stood in.

Confirm scan of room