I recently led the redesign of Speckle’s discussion feature, transforming it into a powerful issue management system that helps teams track problems, assign work, set priorities, and resolve design issues without ever leaving their models.
For years, structured issue tracking had been one of the community’s most consistent requests.
Personally, it was one of the most demanding projects I’ve led this year.
Issue tracking in Speckle. See in hi-res.
Better design reviews
Many tools in the AEC space overcomplicate issue tracking. We focused on keeping it lightweight but still powerful. Our previous discussions feature was popular for its collaborative nature and simplicity, so we wanted to maintain that ease of use while giving users access to additional controls and properties when they need them.
A lot of care went into the smaller interactions, especially around working with issue bubbles and markers. We provide gentle hints to prevent users from clicking the wrong marker, which is especially important when the issues panel is closed and context is limited.
Opening an issue not only loads the content but also restores the saved viewer state, so the cognitive load can be high. I made sure users have all the guidance they need to find and interact with the right issues before committing with a click.
Scope
I led this project from start to finish, working closely with Fabians and Andrew - two great developers. We had a fixed deadline, so we cut corners where it made sense, but the scope creep on this project was significant.
Once the design direction was set, I contributed a lot to front-end tasks, while being careful not to step on the developers’ toes. In many cases, I took on tasks that the devs could pick up later, especially when more technical coordination was required, or focused on delighters and non-critical elements - things that wouldn’t break the system if I made a mistake.
A lot of requirements were rethought in a process, especially around user permissions - who can edit items, assign issues, and so on. This is completely different in AEC tools compared to product design tools (Figma), with many more restrictions.
Once again, the ability to repeatedly zoom out to see the bigger picture and then zoom in to focus on the details proved extremely valuable.