2021–24 / Lead Product Designer
Rail Maintenance Platform
Turning safety-critical rail maintenance software into a tool inspectors trust — and cutting design-to-development time in half while doing it.
Context
Rail operators maintain thousands of assets — tracks, switches, signals — where a missed defect can end lives. The existing software recorded work; it did not help anyone do it. Inspectors carried paper into the field and typed it up afterwards, and product decisions were made by rail experts with deep domain knowledge but no software background.
I joined as the company's first designer. The mandate was one feature; the opportunity was a culture.
Highlights
One-line requirements — "add asset history" — became features nobody could use. Rework was constant, and every fix was discovered after release, in the field, by an inspector standing in the rain.
Key decision
Instead of pitching "UX process", I embedded with product experts and mapped their nouns and verbs — assets, defects, work orders; inspect, report, approve. The map became the shared language between rail experts and engineers. It cost three weeks of designing nothing. It bought every week after.
Process
Every feature now started as a prototype tested with inspectors before a line of code — site visits, interviews, and a lightweight analytics module in demo systems so decisions could cite behavior instead of opinion.
"He aligned stakeholders and went above and beyond what a UX designer typically does — simply because he was exceptionally good at it."
Results
−50%
design-to-development time after the system
+25%
task completion on redesigned safety flows
Credits
Design — Uroš Šolar · with the Boom Rail Solutions product team · Component library with R&D · Research with inspectors at Austrian and German rail operators