AVA
AVA
tl;dr: AVA is the production-critical 3D builder behind Obsess’s retail experiences, and its accumulated structure was rebuilt to reduce operational friction and support future growth.
Product Designer ✋
Engineering Lead
Context
AVA is the 3D internal production tool used to build and ship Obsess’s immersive retail environments for our Fortune 500 clients. Almost everyone in the team relied on it daily to configure scenes, manage components, and prepare client launches.
The Problem
Like most long-running internal tools, it had absorbed years of one-off requests, urgent features, and duct-taped add-ons. Yet, AVA was not used in a calm product environment. It lived inside a deadline driven production workflow with overlapping projects and client expectations that were mostly unforgiving.
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The Rebuild
We started by mapping how AVA was actually being used day to day, and where friction kept repeating. The recurring friction across hotspot controls, scene management, edit traceability, and publishing workflows.
While feedback surfaced many feature requests, the rebuild focused on structural friction that compounded over time. These were the issues slowing scene setup, increasing Slack escalations, and creating hesitation before publish.
On paper, the three shifts seemed straightforward. In practice, they exposed how tightly coupled the editor had become to its own history. Small changes surfaced deeper dependencies, forcing us to confront assumptions baked into the system over time.
What follows shows how those assumptions were restructured in the editor itself, reshaping how hierarchy, state, and feature integration are expressed.
Retrospective
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