Project Background

Our team of six Hyper Island students partnered with Ericsson to take on a real-world UX challenge: building a conceptual prototype that visualizes large, distributed company hierarchies in an elegant and scalable way. The goal was to support users like account managers and system admins who manage mass accounts and needed to traverse deep organizational structures with ease. Think: tree hierarchies, smart dashboards, and powerful, intuitive flows.

As complex as the brief sounded, we broke it down into one central UX problem:

Create a software experience where users can explore large-scale company structures top-down and bottom-up without getting lost.

Key design challenges:

• Navigating thousands of nodes across multiple levels
• Designing for intermediate users with limited time
• Creating a visually appealing, flexible dashboard for multiple roles (admins, account managers, etc.)
• Supporting task-specific actions at every level

And here’s the twist: Ericsson gave us no content. The prototype had to be contextual and conceptual, relying on the UI and logic alone to make sense.

We started with a lot of questions and a lot of meetings. Our very first step was aligning on purpose and outcomes with Ericsson’s system management and UX core teams.

Discovery & Sketching

We kicked off with internal debriefs and collaborative sketch sessions to align our understanding. Over three meetings a week with stakeholders, we continuously refined our ideas and filled in gaps with research as we moved.

• Initial user journey mapping
• Role definition within our team
• Prioritization matrix: user journeys first, then flows
• Sketches → Lo-fi prototypes → Hi-fi interactive prototype

Given our user type (busy professionals), the interface needed to reduce friction dramatically:

• A customizable dashboard based on role and recent activity
• Quick search and drill-down interaction for hierarchy navigation
• Clear system feedback and minimalist interface
• Fast access to node-specific actions (like messaging, editing, or tagging)

We also added microinteractions for clarity—small touches that help users feel in control, even when managing thousands of entries.

We created a high-fidelity prototype in Figma and ran two expert reviews and stakeholder testing sessions.
The feedback was clear: the design worked.

“Very clear overall picture, very nice design pattern.” – Alexandros

“Huge upgrade from what we are using now.” – Magnus

“You can be proud of this work.” – Patrik

“From a drilling-down perspective, it looks very good.” – Ranjani

We couldn’t implement all feedback, some changes required backend assumptions, but we adjusted what we could. Users especially appreciated:

• The smooth hierarchy transitions
• Role-specific shortcuts
• Minimal, focused interface design

Feeling confident, we expanded the concept into mobile and smartwatch mockups.

• Mobile: On-the-go monitoring and editing
• Watch: Urgent alerts and real-time notifications with one flick of the wrist

This proved that our system could scale, visually and functionally across any device, while still feeling intuitive and human.

• ✅ Created a conceptual solution to a real enterprise problem
• ✅ Designed and tested a working hi-fi prototype in under 4 weeks
• ✅ Stakeholders called it a “huge upgrade” from current systems and said it would save them hours of manual searching.
• ✅ Built confidence navigating real-world client feedback and scope changes

This project gave us all a deep dive into enterprise UX at scale, and for me personally, it strengthened my belief in the power of rapid prototyping.