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

The software was built for one 65-inch showroom screen. Taking it to other formats meant a major redesign that kept it usable and kept the storytelling that made it work in a sales setting. The designs I inherited also didn't scale and weren't accessible, 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 coming back to how realtors run an in-person tour. They walk buyers through a prepared story about each property, and the app had to support that. I structured it so realtors could follow that story or jump straight to whatever a buyer asked about.

Watching people use it in public spaces raised a second issue. 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.

Persona and journey mapping

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. Instead, we reworked the component structure and documentation to match how they built. That stalled us for about two weeks, and every sprint after it ran faster.

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.

Prototype screens across device sizes

Results & Impact

Proxima HQ onboarded more than 20 property development clients across Canada during my year there. The redesigned platform is what they were sold, and sales demos ran on the comparison and sharing features.

Key Learnings

Designing for a 65-inch public display is a different problem from designing for a phone. Reach, lighting, several people watching at once, and accessibility all add up in ways standard responsive design doesn't cover. Portrait screens are a third category of their own, and the comparison feature taught me to design for the hardest format first.