Case study 2
Scenario planning
Arup
The Foresight team came with a prototype, a budget and a conviction that they needed more features. What they actually had was a product carrying accumulated debt and a process that still lived in printed documents and the heads of senior advisors. The question was not what to build next. The question was whether anything that existed was worth building on at all.
Role
Product Designer
Team
Business Analyst, Technical Lead, Developers
Timeline
Jan 2022 – May 2022
Arup's Foresight team helped clients prepare for uncertain futures through scenario planning. Internally the process was fragmented. Regional and global teams relied on manual methods led by senior advisors, with no central system to store or access the datasets that informed their work. The team had been investing in a digital tool to change this. When they came to the Digital Services team wanting to expand it, the first task was to understand what they actually had.
Starting from scratch
The existing product was not worth saving.
I spent two weeks conducting a UX and UI audit of the existing prototype. The technical lead ran a technical audit in parallel. Basic interaction issues, accumulated UX and UI debt and a codebase carrying the weight of its development history.
The recommendation was to start from scratch rather than build further on what existed. The Foresight team had already invested meaningful budget in the prototype. Starting over was not the answer they had come for. The audit findings made the case clearly and they agreed without resistance.
Discovery and research
A process mapped before a single screen was designed.
The Business Analyst was with me throughout discovery and research, building BA backlogs and work analysis in parallel with design research rather than sequentially. This kept both streams moving together and ensured findings informed the work from day one.
I led SME interviews to understand how scenario planning worked across the organisation. The process operated across three stages: Scenario pre-development, Scenario development and Scenario testing and use. The MVP scope was defined to cover the first two stages.
That decision was not arbitrary. The scenario planning process had a natural upstream sequence. Stage one established the foundation of drivers, factors and research data that everything in stage two depended on. Without it, the analysis and scenario generation could not begin. I mapped the full end-to-end process, validated the logic with practitioners across global regions and recommended prioritising stage one as the first deliverable. The senior stakeholders and product owners agreed. The scope followed the shape of the real-world process.
I also conducted 1:1 interviews with Foresight practitioners across Australia, the UK and the US to validate the workflow, identify pain points and gather functional and business requirements. Market research ran alongside this. Research continued from product definition through to the end of solution design.
Current state user journey map
JTBD-based user flow
Two decisions that shaped the product
Static files and a non-linear process. Both needed rethinking.
From PDFs to structured data
The Foresight team stored their scenario planning trend data as PDF files. Before COVID they had printed these and plotted them on whiteboards with clients. Digitally they were working in Miro. The assumption was that the PDFs would be stored and accessed within the new platform.
I challenged this. Storing PDFs would keep the data static and unsearchable. I proposed extracting the content and storing it as structured data directly within the platform database, making it interactive and accessible in a way PDFs never could be. I convinced the Business Analyst and the SME first. The SME relayed the decision upward because it represented added scope. The decision was approved and implemented. The platform shifted from a document storage model to an interactive data model.
PDFs to structured data
Designing for a non-linear process
Scenario planning does not follow a fixed sequence. Different clients engage at different stages and a platform that forced a sequential flow would fail the most experienced practitioners. I designed the navigation around this reality. A left navigation bar provided clear hierarchy across all three stages while preserving the user's autonomy to enter at any stage, access data from previous projects and move freely between sections. This was validated through SME sessions, stakeholder showcases and user testing with practitioners.
Non-linear stages - Scenario analysis
Non-linear stages - Trend analysis
Design and delivery
Two phases running in parallel before the first one shipped.
The design process ran across two phases. The ideation phase generated high-level concepts to assess technical and product feasibility through workshops co-led with the SME, Business Analyst and developers. The detailed design phase produced high-fidelity wireframes in Figma using Arup's internal design system, iterated continuously based on technical input and SME feedback.
Validation ran through collaborative walkthroughs with the Business Analyst, SME and developers, followed by user testing with practitioners to refine the flow and navigation. Pre-development I prioritised features, joined planning sessions and delivered final design specs with handover sessions. I performed UX and functional QA during development and post-launch.
Introducing dual-track design
While completing the first phase for development, the Business Analyst and I simultaneously began research and design for the second phase. Scenario development, covering the Morphological box and 2X2 Matrix methods. I introduced this dual-track approach to keep the second phase from starting at zero when the first shipped. The team had not worked this way before.
Managing delivery risk
During delivery I identified that the development team was not progressing at the pace the deadline required. Other projects were being prioritised and the Easter holiday period had reduced available working days.
I held a separate meeting with the technical lead and framed it as a delivery risk conversation. We were approaching the deadline and the current pace was not going to get us there. Having worked with this team before, I knew what they were capable of when focused. The technical lead acted on it. The team recalibrated and the MVP was delivered on time.
Outcome
A fragmented process now had a structured digital home.
The MVP was deployed and made available to Arup's global Foresight team. A process that had previously existed in printed documents and the institutional knowledge of senior advisors now had a structured digital home. The second phase was already in discovery when the project was halted.
Further development did not continue. The budget required to proceed was substantial and when the Foresight SME relayed the cost to senior hierarchy, a miscommunication about the ongoing investment meant the business decided it could not be justified. The decision was made without the project team in the room. The work did not fail. The communication did.
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