Product, Installation & Physical Design
Owning the full product experience at Chromaviso — from physical materials and installation documentation to product guides and instructional design — ensuring the experience doesn't end at the screen.
- Role
- Lead Product Experience Engineer
- Year
- 2019–2026
- Organisation
- Chromaviso A/S
Outcome
A complete, coherent product experience that allows clinical facilities to successfully install, configure, and operate Chromaviso systems without specialist support for routine operations.
Software products ship with release notes. Hardware products that go into hospitals ship with something harder to get right: physical materials that real people in real environments need to follow correctly, every time, without support.
At Chromaviso, product documentation and physical design were not handed off to a technical writer or a packaging agency. They were part of my scope — and treating them seriously as design problems produced meaningfully better outcomes than treating them as a checkbox.
Physical materials
Chromaviso’s products are installed in clinical facilities by biomedical engineers and contractors who may have limited familiarity with lighting control systems. The physical materials — installation guides, wiring diagrams, mounting templates, and commissioning checklists — needed to be usable by someone encountering the product for the first time, under time pressure, in a plant room or above a suspended ceiling.
Designing these materials applied the same principles as interface design: progressive disclosure, context-appropriate detail, clear error states, and unambiguous visual hierarchy. A poorly designed wiring diagram doesn’t produce a bad user experience — it produces a mis-wired installation.
Product documentation
End-user documentation for clinical staff is a genre with specific constraints. Nurses don’t read manuals. What they use are quick-reference cards, contextual help at the point of need, and onboarding materials designed to build a working mental model in a single session.
I designed these materials to match how clinical staff actually learn: short, task-oriented, visual, and forgiving of non-linear reading.
The systems thinking dimension
What made this work interesting — and what made it matter — was maintaining coherence across the full system. The language used in installation documentation should match the language in the software interface, which should match the language used in sales materials and training sessions. Terminology drift is a real problem in complex hardware-software products, and it creates genuine usability issues when a nurse uses a word that doesn’t match anything on the screen.
Owning both the product UX and the documentation meant I could ensure that coherence. It’s a small thing that most organisations don’t prioritise. It’s also the kind of thing users notice — and trust — when it’s done well.
On taking “boring” work seriously
Documentation and physical materials are easy to deprioritise. They’re not on the product roadmap. They don’t get demoed at all-hands meetings. But they’re often the first touchpoint a new customer has with your product at scale, and the one they return to when something doesn’t work.
Taking them seriously as design problems — with the same rigour as an interface or a feature — is a form of respect for the people who have to use them.