Visualizing Complexity with Clarity

A Real Brief from a Real Partner

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 need 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 flexible dashboard for multiple roles , admins, account managers
• Supporting task-specific actions at every level

And here's the twist: Ericsson gave us no content. The prototype had to rely on UI logic alone to communicate the system's structure , no placeholder copy, no sample data.

Discovery and Sketching

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.

Three stakeholder meetings a week kept our thinking calibrated as we moved through the stages , filling in gaps with research, adjusting scope as we learned more.

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

Given our user type , busy professionals managing thousands of entries , the interface needed to reduce friction dramatically. Every design decision was held against a simple test: does this make the user faster?

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

We also added micro-interactions throughout , 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.

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, and the minimal, focused interface.

Mobile and Watch

Feeling confident in the core concept, we expanded into mobile and smartwatch mockups , proving the system could scale visually and functionally across any device, while still feeling intuitive and human.

• Mobile , on-the-go monitoring and editing
• Watch , urgent alerts and real-time notifications with a flick of the wrist

• 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 , said it would save hours of manual searching
• Built confidence navigating real-world client feedback and scope changes

This project gave us a deep dive into enterprise UX at scale. For me personally, it strengthened my belief in the power of rapid prototyping , and in letting the interface speak for itself, even without content.