Beam UI Library
Velodyne Lidar
UI/UX Design Lead
1 Developer
Introducing a modern software experience into a hardware-centric company like Velodyne Lidar was a pivotal challenge.
As UI/UX Design Lead, I transitioned sensor interactions from command-line workflows and manual firmware access into intuitive, productized interfaces, eliminating bottlenecks and replacing fragmented, “science experiment” UIs with cohesive experiences.
With no shared component foundation and multiple product goals to support, I created the Beam UI Library, to unify existing applications and future-proof the software ecosystem through scalability.
A Source of Truth
The goal was to create a versatile UI library for an expanding variety of UI elements while adhering to Velodyne's branding guidelines. Accomplishing this task also ensured that the entire lineup of current and future Velodyne products would have consistent and predictable user experiences that all our engineers would adopt.
ACCOUNTING FOR DIFFERENT CODE
The library had to be friendly with both web and native run time applications, as platform specific codebases sourced data from a live backend.
This was best exemplified with our native run time apps that used C++. The codebase comes with a default set of UI elements but doesn’t have the same breadth of styling as web-based ones. Beam was made with this in mind.
Desktop & Mobile
Beam was also to work with Veella Portal which handled both desktop and mobile use cases.
It had an array of different apps and services, each with their own feature sets. Beam proved to be robust enough to handle the full experience of desktop browser use case, and a more minimalistic mobile one.
In Conclusion
By the time of my departure, apps with Beam were being tested internally before release to the public and touched 90% of our software products. Plans for implementing Beam into a full design system were being discussed, but had not begun.
An A/B comparison of an internal configuration tool before Beam UI treatment, and after.