Drawing Management: 50% reduction in support tickets

On construction projects, nothing gets built until drawings are approved.

Inncircles Drawing Management is where drawings are submitted, reviewed, revised, and approved before site teams can build from them.

Here are the key users & their JTBDs:

• Drawing Admin

  Create extraction templates, manage categories & permissions

• Architect

  Upload drawings file and revise drawings

• Reviewer

  Review, mark up, comment, approve/reject drawings

• Site Engineer

  Use approved drawings for construction

A drawing file typically contains hundreds of drawings, making it difficult for architects to submit and for reviewers to review. None of this was a problem with a handful of sheets. It became a problem at five hundred.

While submitting drawings file, system automatically scans the drawing to fill details like sheet number, sheet name, revision, date, etc.

But the system was failing to fill correct values and the architect then had to manually correct those values and type in the ones that weren't on the sheet.

The drawing admin create a template using a sample drawing where they manually markups the region defining the area to extract values.

The template was built across a four-step wizard. Admins named fields on one screen, positioned them on another, and saw placeholder values in a final preview. There was no way to verify whether a marked region would actually extract the right value.

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A single workspace where user can create labels and define extraction regions.

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Admin can quickly check a defined region value by clicking on “Scan”. If the markup is wrong, he can adjust it and test again.

Preview Mode shows admin all the drawing labels and their real extracted values and the source of each field.

A drawings file can contain multiple type of drawings like electrical, mechanical, parking, ceiling plans, and many more. Each has different labels and layout. One template couldn't extract details accurately for each type. Architects had to manually fix extracted values and enter metadata that didn't exist on the drawing while uploading drawings.

A 500 drawings file was also too much for one reviewer to handle, both in volume and expertise. An electrical engineer shouldn't have to review mechanical sheets. So, the reviewer had to coordinate outside the product.

Also, the reviewer had to switch between multiple screens to view the drawing, check its details, add comments, and finally approve or reject it.

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The review workspace brings everything together — Drawing · Pages · Details · Comments · Pinned Forms — so the reviewer gets a holistic view of the sheet and can approve or reject without leaving it.

Reviewers now see only the drawings from categories assigned to them by the drawing admin, dividing the workload by expertise and making large file faster to review.

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Redesigned Markup tool interaction

Redesigned Comment tool interaction

One of our solution engineers came to us with a specific ask: let reviewer split the drawing file and assign them to other reviewers. Clients kept telling him the same thing on onboarding calls: a file can have 500 to 1,000 drawings, and one reviewer simply can’t get through it.

It was a fair request. But instead of building another way to split the work, we wanted to understand why reviewing was so difficult in the first place. We dug through support tickets, watched drawing admins create templates from start to finish, and spoke with customers to understand how they worked around the problem today.

We judged every idea against two questions. Does it remove the work, or just move it to someone else? And will it still work when a file has thousand sheets, not five hundred?

Most ideas failed one of them. Reviewers did end up getting the drawings file split between them — but the split now comes from how the drawings are organised, so nobody has to do it by hand.

We ran a moderated usability testing on core tasks using a Claude prototype across different roles and stakeholders. Here are the outcomes:

• 😍Users loved how easy it became to create drawing templates to quickly extract data from the blueprints.
• 🙌The new interaction design for creating markups and leaving contextual notes made the review process significantly smoother and left users feeling much happier with the workflow.
• 🌱Architects needed a way to flag when template extraction failed.

I’m open to full-time product design roles and love building side projects just for the fun of it. I’m especially drawn to early B2B products, messy workflows, and ideas I can design, build, and ship myself.