Designing for industrial software means your users are experts who know more than you about their domain, and they will immediately notice if your design doesn't.
Seven years embedded in high-stakes industrial software, designing for engineers, planners, and operators who can't afford to be wrong. From a $1B contract for 3D factory navigation to AI supply chain planning and inclusive ergonomic simulation.
Designing for industrial software means your users are experts who know more than you about their domain, and they will immediately notice if your design doesn't.
Embedded in the product, close to the client
At Dassault Systèmes I work across multiple squads (PMs, lead developers, salespeople), switching between reactive mode (urgent client escalations, well-scoped briefs) and more deliberate bets: design sprint-style workshops, exploratory research with sales reps and app managers, and user testing directly with clients at their sites.
As a lead, I also regularly produce forward-looking design explorations at the request of the Executive Committee, anticipating what tomorrow's industrial experience will look like with AI, generative interfaces, and emerging technologies. I mentor junior designers and interns, and help formalise UX processes across teams.
Most of what I work on is confidential. The three cases below are what I can share.
3D streaming for a $1B industrial contract
A B2B client signed a landmark $1B contract with Dassault Systèmes to digitise their production lines and control towers, an environment radically different from the mechanical modelling 3DS had historically specialised in. I was brought in specifically to solve the core problem: how do you let users navigate 3D models that are, effectively, infinite?
A user who can't load their data can't do their job. Performance isn't a technical metric here: it is the experience. I designed and implemented a new progressive 3D streaming paradigm that loads geometry incrementally as the user navigates, making vast factory-scale datasets feel immediately responsive.
Progressive 3D streaming in action: blue bounding boxes show geometry loading incrementally as the user navigates an infinite factory model.
Supply chain planning in the age of generative AI
In a competitive landscape reshaped by AI, how do you help existing users in discrete manufacturing actually adopt AI-powered supply chain recommendations without feeling like they've lost control?
Digging into the research, the real problem wasn't the AI itself. Planners lacked confidence in recommendations because key data was hard to verify, suggestions lacked transparency, and the algorithms felt like black boxes. A chatbot would have made this worse.
The solution was a more connected, generative UI, one that guides the user step by step, surfacing the reasoning behind every recommendation and making the underlying data verifiable at each stage. Less assistant, more co-pilot.
User research through client seminars and user days, a core part of the discovery process.
Final prototype demo, the generative AI planning interface.
The prototype was validated through user testing using the AttrakDiff methodology, which independently measures pragmatic quality (does it work?) and hedonic quality (do users want it?). Both scored strongly positive, placing the product in the Desired zone.
Inclusive ergonomic simulation at industrial scale
Workplace ergonomic simulation tools have historically relied on a narrow definition of the human body: US-only anthropometric percentiles, calibrated to a specific demographic slice of the global workforce. For an international client base, this is a quiet but consequential design failure: simulations that don't represent your workforce lead to workstations that hurt people.
I led the integration of international anthropometric standards, expanding coverage to all continents. The feature is now in production across all clients, a shift in how industrial ergonomics software thinks about who gets designed for.
Most of this work lives behind NDAs. I'm happy to go deeper in a conversation.
✉ arthur@carreton.fr