Save, organise and share viewer states of your 3D models

We were given the goal to convert more free workspace members to paid seats. Through our research, Saved Views started to feel like a solid bet to achieve this.

The app was powerful but skewed toward technical users, and giving anyone on a project a way to save and share exactly what they're looking at felt like a meaningful step toward closing that gap.

The community forum provided direct access to how users were thinking about features, and to learn more about users' needs I set up research interviews with a number of advocates.

Enthusiasm from one particular partner at a large global design firm was a strong signal, as adoption from them would be an impactful revenue lever.

We discovered that some users had been exploiting the fact that comments capture camera state, using the Discussions feature as a makeshift saved-views system.

One user had even built it into their website, using a series of comments as navigation points.

It was clear that the feature had real user value.

I reviewed how other tools in the space tackled the problem. Trimble Connect came up repeatedly in forum discussions, providing a useful reference point for user expectations.

Traditional AEC software sets a low bar for usability, so we were always looking for opportunities to deliver something that felt more modern and considered.

The design of Saved Views was running parallel to a redesign of the broader viewer UI, with larger surfaces shifting around it.

This meant staying aligned with the other designer, but also offered an opportunity to inject my taste for clean, minimal simplicity into a part of the product that would reach a much wider audience.

It's surprising when a proven UX pattern ends up being entirely unsuitable.

Saved Views had to account for users with different roles and permissions, and views that could be organised into groups.

The exploration led to two clear decisions: views are shared by default, and groups are limited to a single level.

Feedback on early prototypes made it clear that creating a view needed to feel effortless. It would have been technically simpler to use a modal upfront, but that felt too disruptive to broader workflows.

The solution was to remove that friction entirely. Views are created instantly with a default name, with an edit modal available afterwards for keeping things organised.

Once the core functionality was in place, I worked directly in the codebase to make it feel the way it was designed to.

This included enriching the disclosure UI component to support a new variant, without breaking the existing instances.

It was also the moment we switched to Lucide, an icon library I had been pushing for.

Embedding interactive 3D models into Miro boards was already a favourite feature for teams.

With Saved Views in place, embedded models could now open to a specific, curated perspective rather than the default state.

A little enhancement that made a popular use case a lot more useful.

Saved Views became the building block for future features.

Presentations let teams compile a collection of views into an easily shareable narrative, viewable by anyone, no membership required.

Then came Markups, allowing users to draw directly on top of a view for quick async feedback from project directors.

User responses were positive, and we tracked adoption via Mixpanel.

What we found was that the feature alone didn't move the needle on paid seat conversion in the way we'd hoped.

It may be that Saved Views needs more time as part of the broader collaborative design review initiative to reach its potential.