UX/UI Design
SCHAKO KG
Role
Senior UX/UI Designer
Timeline
2023 – ongoing
Industry
Building services engineering (HVAC) · air distribution technology · B2B SaaS
SCHAKO has been manufacturing air distribution components since 1928 and is credited as the inventor of the swirl diffuser — today a European center of expertise for ventilation and air conditioning. With SCHAKOnext, the company is turning its product catalog into a digital planning platform. My job was to make it a tool that reaches HVAC planners earlier in the project — before configuration and tendering — while still delivering the technical precision this audience expects.
Scope of ownership
Strategy → IA → interaction → UX writing → prototype
Core modules designed
AA
Accessibility standard
Target audience
Focus: HVAC planners
Starting Point
SCHAKO already had a capable product configurator and an established online sizing tool — but both stepped in late in the planner's process, at the point of "which product?" In HVAC planning, component choice is actually made much earlier: reaching planners only once they're configuring means competing against decisions that have already been made. So the strategic lever wasn't a better configurator — it was an earlier entry point into the planning workflow, exactly where established competitor platforms have been setting the pace.
On top of that came the complexity of the domain. Planners don't think in individual products — they think in structures: project → building → floor → room → requirement → component. Every room carries its own air-technical parameters — air flow, pressure loss, sound level, fire protection requirements. A tool that starts at the product level doesn't match that mental model and slows the expert down. On top of that came structural data gaps: product data sat in disconnected silos across countries. The core tension of the project: maximum technical depth for experts, without overwhelming first-time users — across several personas, each of whom treats every extra click as lost time. As one example, user exploration around "fast room population" made it easier to add recurring standard rooms.
Approach & Decisions
The foundational decision was a reframe: away from configurator, toward planning platform. The entire information architecture was rebuilt around planners' actual mental model — rooms as the central unit of work, components as their content. In the project view, a room-based register guides you through floors and rooms; each row carries position, label, the monospaced product key, and quantity, while a context-sensitive side panel bundles room data, air volumes, and notes. That keeps the overview flat, with depth available on demand.
This principle of progressive disclosure runs through every module. Three decisions shaped the result in particular. First: a considered system for critical actions that shows users at a glance how consequential a step is, instead of treating every deletion the same way. Second: technical feasibility as a design input — implementation constraints weren't treated as an obstacle but factored into the design from the start. Third: accessibility as a baseline, not an afterthought, with WCAG 2.2 AA as a binding standard from day one, validated through standalone, clickable prototypes.
"A configurator asks: which product? A planner thinks in projects, rooms, and requirements. SCHAKOnext was built around how planners think — not around the product catalog."
Impact
The reframe gave SCHAKO a strategic entry point earlier in the planning workflow — exactly where component choice actually happens. Rather than pitting a configurator against established platforms, SCHAKOnext positions itself as a planning environment in which the catalog is just one building block among several.
The concepts developed became the basis for prioritizing the next stage of the roadmap — AI-assisted pre-sizing, a template marketplace, and an integrated knowledge layer. For the AI features, we set firm design principles up front: transparency instead of "magic," full reversibility of every suggested action, and confidence scoring with provenance tracking — not as a feature, but as a precondition for planners trusting the suggestions while keeping professional accountability clearly assignable. The product configurator was also redesigned as part of this work and embedded into the project workflow (see the following screen).
Role & Collaboration
I owned UX/UI across the full depth of the project — from strategic positioning through information architecture and interaction design to UX writing and frontend prototyping.
I worked closely with product ownership and engineering, as well as subject-matter and cross-site stakeholders; implementation realities and data constraints continuously fed back into the design as parameters. My prototypes served validation more than illustration: standalone, technically compatible artifacts that let concepts be checked before implementation.