Alfa Laval

Problem / Context

Alfa Laval supplies heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling solutions for the maritime, energy, food, and water industries. Its digital transformation had started as several separate efforts to build HMIs, dashboards, and web applications. Each was developed on its own, with no shared visual language, and every project started from scratch. The products looked and behaved differently from one another, development was slow, and the people operating machinery had to cope with the inconsistencies. Alfa Laval needed one coherent system that business users, designers, and developers could all work with.

My role

I worked with Alfa Laval for two years as a consultant for EGGS Design. At first I designed and prototyped UI for on-shore HMI screens, which gave me a close understanding of the users, the machines, and the constraints. Later I led the rollout of the company-wide design system. That meant managing change across the organisation, working closely with developers, handling stakeholders and project planning, and leading a small EGGS design team that produced components, data visualisations, and illustrations.

To test the system, I built HMI prototypes in Figma and projected them onto the HMI screens in Alfa Laval’s office. Together with users on site, we evaluated how the prototypes performed in dark environments, and also how well the functionality, visual language was implemented to deliver on the desired outcomes.

Solution

We delivered ALO, two separate but unified design systems, together with the infrastructure to keep them in use: version control, use cases, guidelines, sample layouts, prototyped applications, and plans for future development. Teams now have one shared foundation to build from instead of starting over each time.