Tools for engineers
Three internal products for the engineers at BG&E, designed in Figma from wireframes up and built by the Digital Engineering team from the mockups.
- Client
- BG&E Digital Engineering
- Type
- Product
- Role
- UX and UI, wireframes to handover
- Year
- 2024–25
- Kit
- Figma
The brief
Engineers build good tools for engineers and rarely have anyone to design the interface. Three of them came to the desk with a data model, a workflow and a lot of screenshots.
Each had a real user who would be using it under time pressure: a bid writer assembling CVs the night before a tender, an engineer on site looking up a beam, a planner moving rolling stock around a yard.
What made it hard
The workflows were long. Updating a CV from a project report touches people, projects, clients and dates, and every one of those is a place to make a mistake. Most of the design time went on making the long path feel short.
The useful unit was never the record. It was the calculation, the status, the next move. Getting that onto a card or a row without turning it into a spreadsheet took the iterations.
AI4CV: from wireframe to shipped
A profile and CV platform: parse CVs and project reports into a searchable base of people, projects and clients, then generate tailored CVs for tenders. Sketches and wireframes first, then the UI and the rollout posters. The final build took a slightly different path and kept the structure.
Span Tables: search first, browse second
A lookup library for structural products across manufacturers: search with the calculation inputs in the result row, browse by category with the same card, and an Android version cut down to the lookup. Shipped, and since grown into SpectaCalc.
Rail yard shunting
Planning UI for moving rolling stock around a yard: the board, the moves, the conflicts. Early-stage work, planning and screens, with the same rule as the other two: the next move is the thing on screen.
Shipped, side by side
Drag the handle: my wireframe against the shipped AI4CV.
What happened
AI4CV generates CVs for tenders. Span Tables shipped internally and became SpectaCalc, a product catalogue with calculators for the AEC industry; the interactions there are the Digital team’s, the base is this.
- UX and UI
- Eddy Huang
- Build and later product
- BG&E Digital Engineering
- Workflow
- Figma only. These predate the agent workflow.
Next
BG&E, 2022–2026The digital side of a global engineering consultancy, run from one desk: the site, the systems behind it, the content that fills it, and the numbers that come back.