Making industrial asset tagging 11× faster

VEERUM digitises entire industrial facilities into navigable 3D environments — letting contractors tag and document assets from a browser, anywhere in the world.

I joined as their first and only designer, tasked with building a design practice from scratch and introducing user research to the product for the first time. Linear objects was the most impactful thing I shipped there.

Imagine you work at an oil and gas facility. To document what's out there, someone has to physically go to the site — get certified to set foot there, fly somewhere remote up north, drive the rest of the way, suit up in full safety gear, and walk around with a stack of paper. Miss something, and you go back.

VEERUM removed the trip. But the only way to tag an asset was with a 3D cube — fine for a pump or a tank, a nightmare for anything linear. To tag one pipe you drew fifteen cubes end to end and ended up with fifteen separate tags for one asset, none of which followed its shape.

Expansion revenue, sitting on the table, gated on how long tagging took.

This feature had been on the roadmap for years. Executives called it a game-changer. Everyone who worked with clients knew the problem inside out — which is exactly why I didn't take it at face value. Strong opinions held for a long time aren't the same as evidence.

We went to clients directly — around 11 people across Imperial Oil, Suncor and Exxon — and asked two specific questions: were they outsourcing because the tool was too tedious, and would they do it themselves if it were easier?

Both confirmed. Now the feature had a reason beyond conviction.

The existing tool worked one way: you drew a 3D cube around an asset, named it, and that cube became the tag. I brought three directions.

Talking it through, the dev team mentioned VEERUM already had a measurement tool working almost exactly like option 2 — you click points, it draws a line, it tells you the distance. The interaction existed. It just needed extending so the result could be named, saved and exported like a cube.

You can't simulate a 3D spatial tool in Figma. A clickable prototype would have tested a picture of the thing, not the thing.

So I worked with the dev team to build something functional directly in the dev environment. Scrappy, but real enough to put in front of people.

Two rounds, seven internal participants. The contractors who actually do the tagging are mostly in India, and the time difference made them impossible to schedule — so we tested internally and accepted that limitation rather than skip testing.

Contractors kept doing the tagging — outsourcing stayed cost-effective — but faster, more accurately, and with far less friction.