ImpactTrace

ImpactTrace lets manufacturers register a product, model its life-cycle impact, issue traceable labels and publish a Digital Product Passport that anyone can scan. The domain is dense — bills of materials, ReCiPe impact methods, emission flows, custody handovers — and the users are operations and sustainability staff, not analysts. My job was to make a regulated, data-heavy workflow feel like filling in a form and reading a receipt.

Role

Lead UI/UX Designer — research, IA, flows, data visualization, UI system, handoff

Timeline

7 months (discovery → MVP → rollout)

Tools

Figma, FigJam, Figma Dev Mode, Maze, Jira

Platform

Responsive web app + public Digital Product Passport

• Creating one product touches six distinct data domains; asking for all of it on one screen was unusable, but splitting it risked people abandoning halfway.
• LCA output is scientific — UUIDs, acidification, DCB-eq, MJ-eq — and had to stay accurate while remaining readable to non-specialists.
• Traceability spans companies: each handover (plant, transport, warehouse) needed a timestamp, a location and an exception state without turning into a wall of logs.
• The same underlying record serves two very different audiences: an internal operator building it, and a consumer scanning a QR code.
• Partner data arrives incomplete, so every screen needed honest empty, pending and 'critical event' states.

The design direction focused on these documented product decisions:

• Creating one product touches six distinct data domains; asking for all of it on one screen was unusable, but splitting it risked people abandoning halfway.

  Each step owns one data domain and saves independently; the Summary tabs (Overview, Components, LCA, Traceable Labels) let a user verify everything in one place before submitting, which removed the fear of an irreversible mistake.

• LCA output is scientific — UUIDs, acidification, DCB-eq, MJ-eq — and had to stay accurate while remaining readable to non-specialists.

  Inventory tables sit beside impact charts using one shared colour scale, and every emission row carries category, value and unit — specialists get precision, everyone else gets the shape of the result.

• Traceability spans companies: each handover (plant, transport, warehouse) needed a timestamp, a location and an exception state without turning into a wall of logs.

  Carbon footprint, transport mode and critical-event counts sit as three status cards above an expandable timeline and route map, so the health of a shipment reads in seconds and the detail is one click away.

• The same underlying record serves two very different audiences: an internal operator building it, and a consumer scanning a QR code.

  The public DPP leads with product identity, a QR code and a verifiable-attributes grid (facilities, certifications, circularity, LCA, water, emissions, energy), then shows the raw-material → manufacturing → retail custody chain with masked partner identities.

• Partner data arrives incomplete, so every screen needed honest empty, pending and 'critical event' states.

  Designed a wizard-based product intake (information → specification → bill of materials → LCA → traceable labels → summary), an LCA analysis view that pairs inventory tables with impact charts, and a Digital Product Passport that presents verifiable attributes, chain of custody and a scannable QR to end consumers.

1. 01

   Progressive-disclosure IA

   Broke product creation into six ordered steps — Product Information, Specification, Bill of Materials, LCA Details, Traceable Labels, Summary — with a persistent stepper, per-step save, and a final Summary that recaps everything under tabs before submission.

2. 02

   Designing the LCA language

   Worked with the analyst to standardise how impact is expressed: paired Input/Output inventory tables with an Impact Analysis table and charts, always showing category, value and unit together so a number never appears without its scale.

3. 03

   Trace as a timeline + map

   Prototyped custody as a vertical timeline of facilities and transport legs, each expandable to its own events, mirrored by a route map. Critical events surface as an inline warning marker rather than a separate alerts inbox.

4. 04

   Digital Product Passport

   Designed the consumer-facing view as a two-column read: product identity and QR on the left, verifiable attributes as an icon grid on the right, with unverified attributes visibly greyed out instead of hidden — proof of what is *not* claimed matters as much as what is.

Documented project outputs

• 6 → 1 — Data domains in one guided flow
• 8 — Operators tested with
• 1 — Unified chart & table system
• QR — Public passport per batch

In traceability products, trust is built by what you refuse to imply. Greying out unverified attributes and marking a critical event inline made the platform feel more credible than any amount of polish on the verified path — users believed the green checks precisely because the gaps were visible.