Company
Ericsson
Timeline
18 months
Role
Sole product designer
Team
PM, engineering, solution architects
Platform
Web application
Status
Shipped
Case study
Shipped
By automating the telecom site diagrams process, so that a revision doesn’t take users back to step 1.
Before Site Simulator, sales solution teams drew every diagram by hand in PowerPoint. One RFxRFx is a catch-all procurement acronym meaning “Request for X,” where “X” represents the specific type of information, proposal, or pricing requested from potential suppliers response could need more than a hundred of them, and a response could go round seven or eight times before it closed.
Over nearly 18 months (as the sole designer on the product), my work spanned across many flows in the system. To know more about them please reach outsaoumya_mandhar@berkeley.eduClick to write an email
100+
hand-drawn diagrams in one RFx response
7–8
review rounds per response
↓ 78%
less time per sales proposal
01 · Overview
Problem
Pre-sales teams drew every network site by hand in PowerPoint and redrew it after each change request. One response went round seven or eight times.
What I did
Designed both phases of a site design: the proposal concept, a bill of materials with a 3D preview of the structure, and the canvas, where the configuration becomes the site diagram. Plus version comparison with anchored comments.
Status
Shipped. Time per diagram measured in a pilot against the PowerPoint baseline.
Ericsson answers hundreds of customer proposals a year. Before a customer signs, they need to know
1
What the network site will look like
2
Which products, radios and basebands, connect to which
3
Which cellular networks they carry
4
What has to be bought
5
What can be reused, for an existing client
02 · The hypothesis
What we bet on
If the tool draws the site diagram from the equipment list and saves every change as a version, a change request becomes a quick edit, not a redraw.
The equipment list already says which products a site needs, which network carriersA carrier is one mobile network signal a radio sends out, for example LTE on 800 MHz. A site usually carries several. they serve and how they connect. A diagram generated from that list cannot fall out of date. Saved versions let the team go back, compare, and show the customer what changed. To test this, the design had to answer four questions.
1
How do we turn a list of equipment into a diagram the customer can read?
2
How do we record which radio serves which sector and carrier, so engineers do not have to keep track of it themselves?
3
How do we turn a change request into a quick edit instead of a redraw?
4
How do we show the customer what changed between two versions?
03 · One system
One source, three views
Every view reads from one record of the siteEverything the tool knows about a site: the equipment, which network each radio carries, and which port each cable uses.. The configuration table and the canvas both edit it, so a change in one shows up in the other. Nothing is drawn twice.
04 · Proposal Concept
Picking products
Pick what goes on the site, and see it on the structure in 3D.
A proposal conceptA proposal concept is the bill of materials for one possible site: every product, how many, and the height it sits at on the structure. is the first phase: the bill of materials for a site. Engineers pick radios, antennas and the baseband unitThe baseband unit processes the signal and controls the radios. Each radio is connected to it by cable. from a catalogue into a cart, one row per height on the support structure, and a 3D preview shows the structure filling up. There is no diagram yet. The concept is also what gets exported to the customer, as a PowerPoint or a PDF.
The decision
Treat the bill of materials like a shopping cart.
Engineers already know how online shopping works. A catalogue with filters, a cart for each support structure and one row per height made the first phase familiar, and the cart catches a duplicate height before it ever reaches a diagram.
05 · Canvas
The diagram
The diagram is where you edit connections, not a drawing beside them.
The canvas is the second phase, where a concept becomes a site diagram. Engineers record which radio serves which network on each side of the site, and the connections and the diagram are built from that. A single cable can carry up to four networks, and the old tool let labels pile up after every refresh. The canvas lays out the cascadeA cascade chains radios one after another, so a single cable from the baseband feeds several radios., colours each link by the network it carries, and keeps labels where people put them.
The decision
Occupied ports stay selectable, and connections swap.
Disabling occupied portsA port is a socket on a radio or a baseband where a cable plugs in. Each one can take only one cable. looked safe but made the dialog a dead end. Showing both ends, and stating the swap before you commit, kept the edit in one place.
06 · Site Scenario
Review and comments
Compare two versions of a site, and argue about the difference on the diagram itself.
A comparison is not internal paperwork. Solution teams send it to the customer as a revised propositionAn updated offer sent back to the customer after they ask for changes., so it lives in ReviewReview is the part of the tool where two versions of a site are compared and discussed with comments. as its own object, saved and exported with the diagram it explains.
The decision
Three views of one comparison, one toggle apart.
Engineers check what moved, customers want before and after, approvers want totals. One toggle serves all three.
07 · Also shipped
Supporting work
About these screens. This is work I did as the product designer on Site Simulator at Ericsson. The screens, data and videos are rebuilt for this portfolio to share the essence of that work, with confidential details changed or left out. They are not an exact record of the product as it exists at Ericsson.