Scaling Proxima's Virtual UX

As the sole UX designer at Proxima HQ, I took their virtual property showroom from a single-screen experience to a responsive application that worked everywhere its clients did: 65-inch showroom displays, portrait lobby screens, desktop, and mobile.

The app was born during the COVID-19 pandemic to replace physical property tours, and it quickly became central to Proxima HQ's real estate clients. The job was to grow it into a platform realtors could run a sale through, and buyers would actually enjoy browsing.

The Challenge

Initially built for a 65-inch showroom screen, the software needed significant redesign to scale across platforms without sacrificing usability or the storytelling that made it work in a sales setting. The inherited designs also lacked scalability and accessibility, which mattered most on the large public screens.

Research & Insights

My process began with competitive analysis and desk research, alongside in-depth interviews with Vancouver-based property developers and realtors. Early prototypes were validated through beta testing sessions.

The interviews kept circling one theme: an in-person tour is a performance. Realtors guide clients through a structured narrative about each property, and the app had to support that. Its structure ended up built around exactly this, letting realtors follow a prepared narrative or jump straight to whatever a buyer asked about.

Observing usage in public spaces added a second layer: the same screen had to work for standing adults of different heights and for wheelchair users, in ambient lighting a designer's monitor never sees.

Design Decisions

One system, four formats

One design system covered every format. Device-specific flows were tuned individually, but core components and interactions stayed the same, so moving between a lobby screen and a phone never meant relearning the app. Large screens got particular care: a persistent bottom navigation bar kept controls within reach for users of different heights and for wheelchair users.

The comparison feature, and the portrait problem

The hardest design problem was the property comparison feature. It had to handle multiple unit types, layouts, and configurations, using the same components across landscape displays, portrait lobby screens, and mobile. Landscape and mobile had established patterns to lean on. Portrait had neither the width of a landscape screen nor the interaction conventions of a phone, and comparison is an inherently side-by-side activity. Getting it to work there took considerably more iteration than anywhere else. I tested vertical stacking against side-by-side columns across several rounds of user testing, and my assumption was that stacking would win on a portrait screen. It didn't. Columns won, because buyers compare floorplans by looking directly across, and stacking broke that. The final design kept the columns and solved the width problem instead, while the underlying components stayed identical across every format. It became one of the features sales demos leaned on most.

Inheriting a new development team

Halfway through my time there, a new development team came aboard and brought their own ways of working, including requests for major changes to the design system I'd built. My first instinct was to defend the system; the better move, it turned out, was to treat their conventions as requirements. We reworked component structures and documentation to fit how they actually built, which cost time in the short term and repaid it every sprint after. It was the most instructive stretch of the project: a design system's value isn't its internal elegance, it's whether the people building from it can move fast.

Prototyping & Testing

I iterated designs across all screen sizes, testing realtor and buyer experiences throughout. Large-screen testing in live showrooms uncovered problems a desk never would have: text scaling and resolution fidelity at viewing distances of several metres, prompting substantial layout changes.

On mobile and desktop, I focused on the interactions buyers repeated most, saving favourite listings and generating shareable summaries, keeping them consistent across devices. Accessibility ran through all of it: contrast, touch-target sizing, and ergonomics tested for seated and standing users alike.

Results & Impact

During my year there, Proxima HQ onboarded more than 20 new property development clients across Canada. I can't isolate the redesign's contribution to that growth, and I won't pretend to. What I can say is that the redesigned platform was the product those clients bought, the comparison and sharing features became the backbone of sales demos, and feedback from realtors and buyers kept sharpening the design throughout.

Key Learnings

Designing for a 65-inch public display is a genuinely different problem from designing for a phone. Ergonomics, ambient lighting, multi-person viewing, and accessibility all compound in ways that standard responsive design thinking doesn't account for. Portrait screens are their own third category, and the comparison feature taught me to design for the hardest format first.

The insight that mattered most, though, came from the realtor interviews: the app needed to support a performance, not just browsing. Realtors were telling a story. Every design decision had to ask: does this help or interrupt that narrative?