Overview
SiteSafe, a non-profit construction industry leader and health & safety training provider in New Zealand, acquired Zero Harm—a fledgling farming-focused health and safety platform. Through strategic workshops and systematic redesign, I guided their pivot to construction market, leveraging SiteSafe’s industry credibility to enable successful market entry and establish foundation for scalable growth.
Challenge
The acquired platform suffered from fundamental strategic gaps that manifested as design problems: unclear target market, no pricing strategy, and chaotic information architecture across 50+ screens. Interface improvements were premature without business foundation—the product needed strategic direction before design refinement.
My role
Effect (my employer) was brought in by SiteSafe to assess the existing Zero Harm app and identify opportunities for improvement ahead of its launch into the construction industry. Following the audit, I embedded myself into the SiteSafe team as a UX and product designer, working alongside developers and project managers to continuously evolve the platform. My role included:
- Addressing key usability issues in the existing app.
- Helping define product strategy, including pricing models and target user segments.
- Led the redesign of UI and overall UX.
- Designing new construction-specific features.
Solution
Through product research, I identified that UX problems were symptoms of a missing business strategy and led strategic workshops to define the target market (SME construction), an innovative site-based pricing model, and competitive positioning. Through a comprehensive platform audit, I documented an inconsistent A-E level page hierarchy and eliminated the 6+ site discovery methods in favor of a unified Sites page with a search-first approach. I implemented a systematic component library in Figma while designing cross-company hazard management features that enabled consistency across multiple company sites.
Impact
- Research-driven strategy pivot enabled successful construction market entry through clear target market definition and innovative pricing model.
- Eliminated navigation confusion by reducing 6+ site discovery methods to single source of truth with systematic workflow optimization.
- Reduced workflow complexity for key features such as Hazards, reducing total pages from 7 to 6 even as many additional compliance requirements were added.
- Evolution and improvements to design system reduced development complexity, enabling rapid feature iteration and integration of new brand.
Discovery
UX audit reveals strategic gaps
Initially brought in to conduct a UX audit for construction market transition, I quickly identified that interface problems were symptoms of deeper strategic gaps. The product lacked clear target users, market positioning, and pricing model—making design improvements premature without business foundation.
I documented 50+ screens with an inconsistent A-E level page hierarchy where similar tasks had wildly different interaction patterns. The platform had grown without systematic design principles, creating user confusion and development inefficiency.
There was a clear lack of standardised page templates. As I documented the pages, it was clear that new features were being added but there was not a consistent set of rules or interactions to guide their implementation. This caused the user experience to be wildly varied between similar tasks.
What is driving the confusion
Behind the chaos of the existing app structure was the lack of clarity about product positioning, users and target markets.
As we started asking questions about users, key product offerings, we didn’t have a clear picture of what the target market is. The product was intended for the construction market, but other markets were still in consideration. On top of this, the construction market has quite varied market segments.
The client had some existing personas, backed by their research and customer interviews. The users and potential users crossed a wide range from farmers, vineyard owners and managers, large property owners, industrial sites, property managers, construction foreman, and large construction companies.
Research outcomes
I recommended pausing the audit to focus on strategic alignment. As an external partner, I could challenge internal assumptions and guide the team toward clearer product strategy that would inform subsequent design decision.
Strategy
With the SiteSmart product team, and at a later stage C-Suite members, I led a series of strategic workshops to define the product vision, competitor analysis, target market and pricing strategy.
Workshop outcome: Success for SiteSafe
Clarified that SiteSafe’s non-profit mission required balancing profit growth with safety outcomes—focusing sustainable H&S delivery for New Zealand market rather than pure revenue maximization.
Workshop outcome: Target market, user and competitor clarity
Through competitor analysis and market sizing, narrowed focus to small-medium construction enterprises. SMEs lack time/skills for H&S implementation, manage multiple small sites, and align with SiteSafe’s domain expertise—unlike large enterprises with sophisticated existing systems.
Workshop outcome: Pricing Model & Product Proposition
Site based subscription: SiteSafe will base its subscription costs primarily around physical sites requiring Health and Safety. A “site” is any physical location with H&S requirements—construction zones, farms, or offices. A “site” refers to any worksite with Health & Safety (H&S) requirements—such as a construction site, a farm, or even an office. This model ensures that users pay based on the real-world work they are managing.
As a contractor’s business scales with more physical sites, they can increase their subscription. This model also offers a role based simplicity, the person most responsible for H&S is the one that pays. This also aligns with the costing models for construction, with the main contractor able to bring this cost into their ‘Preliminaries and General’ pricing for construction projects.
Free for workers: To increase adoption and lower participation barriers, the app would be free for workers — aligning with SiteSmart’s mission to improve New Zealand’s safety culture. In addition to lowering barriers to H&S participation this will help increase adoption. Instead of charging workers, we focus on businesses as paying customers. Your average worker won’t pay out of their own pocket for the app, but the main contractor or business owner will easily pay a small monthly cost to reduce their administration overheads.
Network effect: Due to there being many more workers and subcontractors in construction than businesses themselves, they would form the backbone of our network effect. Subcontractors are the connectors in the network. They regularly work across multiple sites and companies, and they need to view and submit H&S in many places. Once their H&S information is completed once on the platform they can easily share and request others to share. Invitations to sites play a key role in helping this. Subcontractors might request a site be setup from main contractors, or main contractors invite subcontractors.
Design: Structuring the app for construction sites
With clear strategic direction established, I focused on restructuring the platform to serve construction users’ multi-site workflow needs. The original farming-focused architecture assumed users had single sites and static roles, but construction users work across multiple sites with shifting responsibilities—a foreman might simultaneously manage one site, contribute to another, and transition a third to specialists.
The binary “Site Administration vs My Workplaces” structure created fragmented user experience with 6+ different pathways to access sites across inconsistent interfaces. Users faced different site tables depending on entry point (Homepage, Dashboard, Search), creating constant confusion.
Below, you can see all the different types of landing pages that a user could find sites from.
A unified sites solution
Our key goal was to simplify the relationship between users and sites, moving away from a choosing ‘admin’ or ‘workplaces’ we simplified everything into a single, streamlined ‘Sites’ page (Refer to sitemap below).
Opening ‘Sites’ essentially opens the search page. All sites a user has access to is available here, allowing for searching, browsing and filtering. To the right of the image below, is a proposed Dashboard, including items such as ‘To do’ items but also the same ‘Sites’ table to keep a consistent user experience.
Note that you will see on the Site search page that tabs still separate ‘Sites you manage’, ‘Sites you work on’ and ‘Public sites’. Backend limitations meant we still needed to separate the data, but the user still had access to all these options from one place. A hypothesis that was not tested at the time was that people who managed sites would mainly use the first tab. If they didn’t manage sites, they wouldn’t have that tab display anyway.
To reinforce this experience, the remaining avenues to find sites would all push users to the same place. The Dashboard had a similar sites table and the Search feature would allow for either direct searches or push users to the ‘Sites’ page.
Outcomes
I eliminated fragmented site discovery in favor of single Sites page with search-first approach. All sites became accessible through central hub with role-based filtering (manage/work/public), while accommodating backend data constraints through improved UX patterns rather than structural changes.
Design: Hazards feature
For key features, such as managing hazards, I re-designed them to enable a site based model, account for new legislative requirements, and reduce complexity to improve the user experience.
Hazards
A first analysis of the hazard user flow revealed a confusing and problematic structure. Interaction patterns were inconsistent, the user had to re-open previous screens to complete their work, naming conventions for key actions didn’t align with users expectations and parts of the flow didn’t provide clear next steps.
New user flow to provide clear actions
Using Figjam, I quickly mapped out an updated user journey which would allow users to make logical next steps, and also cater to the new information requirements.
The new user flow would allow users to select a hazard from the list and then either edit it immediately (replacing the whole ‘new assessment process’) or edit it later. Editing later allow the user to either keep adding hazards to the list or return to other tasks, doing away with confusing terms like ‘customise’.
Further iteration ensures users complete key tasks
User research showed users were adding empty and generic hazards to the list. A list of empty Hazards didn’t make anyone safer.
The new workflow steps users through the complete wizard experience.
Outcomes
- New user flow took 6 steps, instead of original 7, despite additional legislative requirements being added.
- The process was a simple linear flow that resulted in meaningful safety information being added to the hazard.
Managing hazards across the company
To support the new site-based pricing model and ensure safety consistency, I designed a system where company admins can push hazard updates globally with site-level approval workflows. Site managers receive notifications of changes (e.g., updated “Dust and airborne particulates” protocols) and can either adopt company standards or reject them based on unique site conditions—balancing consistency with local autonomy while reducing administrative overhead.
Below, you can see the notification panel in yellow (left UI design) with the updated information being displayed in the modal (right UI design).
Design: Scalable design system implementation
The brand design was incorporated into the new UI decisions, focusing on creating a more consistent and readable UI. In addition to the UI features identified below, the whole design system for the app was re-structured, giving the development team a kit of parts they could continue to use into the future.
Page types: One of the key findings from the audit was the number of different page formats used for similar page types, as per the below image. There wasn’t a consistent reason for when a white, grey background was used, or whether a grey sidebar or a white sidebar was used.
Navigation: The mobile and desktop navigation was overhauled, particularly the mobile design. Previously the Mobile navigation had excessive icon clutter and redundant menus, making key tasks difficult to access.
Sidebars: The sidebars needed to still be accessible from mobile, this navigation pattern was overhauled to be a submenu below the nav. Some key changes also include chunking navigation items into logical sections to make it more digestible.
Outcomes
This project showed how UX can do more than fix screens — it can reframe the product, sharpen the business model, and unify the team around a shared purpose. The redesign gave SiteSmart the foundation to grow from a legacy farming app to a trusted platform for NZ’s construction industry.
Impact
- Research-driven strategy pivot enabled successful construction market entry through clear target market definition and innovative pricing model.
- Eliminated navigation confusion by reducing 6+ site discovery methods to single source of truth with systematic workflow optimization.
- Reduced workflow complexity for key features such as Hazards, reducing total pages from 7 to 6 even as many additional compliance requirements were added.
- Evolution and improvements to design system reduced development complexity, enabling rapid feature iteration and integration of new brand.
Designs
