Plain language before numbers
A finding reads as a sentence first; the measurement supports it rather than leading.
01The problem
Cable faults are slow, silent and hard to read.
Cables fail slowly and out of sight. The data that predicts it is hard to read.
Wirescan’s technology scans cables and compares the result against a baseline, so a change along the line, such as a joint taking on moisture, shows up before it becomes an outage. That information is precise but abstract: distances, percentages, impedance steps.
The people using it are maintenance and operations engineers. They need to know what changed, where, how serious it is, and what to do next, without decoding a chart first.
The design goal: every finding answers four questions in order. What is it, where is it, how bad is it, and what should I do?
02My part & the team
Design for the product, prototypes for what’s next.
A client assignment through Cefalo, alongside Wirescan’s team and Cefalo engineers.
What I did
- Product UX/UI for cable-diagnostics and maintenance interfaces.
- Brand applications that keep the product and the company recognisably one thing.
- Modular components and patterns for inspection data and status.
- Spatial prototypes in Three.js, WebXR and Unity, including the wind-farm twin.
What the team did
- Wirescan owns the diagnostic technology, the measurement science and product direction.
- Cefalo engineers implemented the production product.
- The prototypes are design explorations; they are not a deployed Wirescan AR product.
03Readable inspection data
What, where, how bad, what next.
The first job was making inspection results readable without colour doing all the work.
- Lead with the finding
- A plain-language headline first (“impedance step at the transition joint”), the measurement second.
- Say where
- Every finding names its asset and position along the cable, so it can be located on site.
- Severity in words
- Critical, warning and watch are written labels with their own markers, not just red, amber and blue.
- Compare to the baseline
- A change is shown against the earlier scan, because a reading alone doesn’t say whether it’s getting worse.
- Always a next step
- Each finding carries a recommended action, so the panel moves from diagnosis to a plan.
- Meaningful labels
- Turbines, feeders, joints and the substation keep consistent, short identifiers across every view.
04The wind-farm twin
The diagnostics, placed where they happen.
The wind-farm twin puts the same diagnostics in the place they describe.
It’s a browser-based 3D model of a coastal wind park: offshore and onshore turbines, the cables between them, the landfall and the substation. Each turbine carries a small label with its current output, and a fault marker sits exactly where the cable scan found the change.
A header keeps the whole park in view (wind, total output, energy today, available turbines, sea state), and a timeline lets an engineer play the day back at 60×, 600× or 3,600×, or return to live.
Prototype captured from the running app. Every value shown is simulated demo data.
05Cables & health
From a line in a report to a route you can follow.
Switching to “Cables and health” hides the scenery and shows the network.
Cable routes from each turbine to the substation light up, and feeders with a finding are marked along their length. It turns an abstract line in a report into a route someone can follow, from the turbine to the joint that needs attention.
06Diagnostics to a plan
Every finding ends with a next step.
Findings, the plan and the assets live in one panel, ordered by urgency.
The panel opens on a summary (one critical, two warning, three watch), then lists each finding with what was seen, where, how it compares to the baseline, and a recommended step, such as planning an outage and pumping a joint pit. Findings, Plan and Assets tabs keep diagnosis, work planning and the asset list separate but one click apart.
07Inspecting an asset
The record, on the turbine itself.
Selecting a turbine opens a compact inspection card on the asset itself.
The card shows the turbine’s status in words, then output, rotor speed, wind, generator temperature and energy today, with a 12-hour output chart against its rated power. Details opens the full record, and AR opens the same asset in augmented reality on a phone, or as a tabletop model.
08Modular components
One component set for screens and space.
Behind both the screens and the twin is one set of components.
Status chips, finding rows, metric readouts, asset cards and toolbar controls are designed once and reused, whether they sit in a dashboard, float in a 3D scene or appear in AR. Explicit states (healthy, watch, warning, critical, unavailable) mean a component behaves the same way everywhere, and prototypes in Unity and Three.js test that behaviour beyond static Figma screens.
09Design decisions
Calls that shaped the work.
Calls that shaped the work.
Severity never by colour alone
Every status has a word and a marker, so it survives colour blindness, glare outdoors and greyscale printouts.
Put the data where the asset is
The twin shows a fault on the cable it affects, instead of in a separate list people have to map back to the site.
One component set for screen and space
Reusing the same status and metric components in 2D and 3D keeps meaning consistent between views.
Honest prototypes
The twin and AR flows are explorations with simulated data, presented as such.
10Accessibility
A 2D route to everything in 3D.
WCAG 2.2 AA is the target for the screen interfaces, with APCA as a supplementary readability check. Spatial views also need routes that don’t depend on 3D.
- A 2D route to everything
- Findings, assets and the plan are available as lists, so nothing requires navigating the 3D scene.
- Status in words
- Critical, warning, watch and healthy are labelled, not only coloured.
- Keyboard shortcuts with labels
- View modes, layers, zoom and AR have named controls and listed shortcuts.
- Readable over imagery
- Labels and panels sit on solid or tinted surfaces so text stays legible over the landscape.
- Motion under control
- Playback is user-started, and camera movement can be stopped or reset to a home view.
- Not a safety claim
- Industrial usability work is not evidence of safety certification; ISO 9241-210 and EN 301 549 guide the review.
Design targets, not audit results. No formal conformance or safety review is claimed.
11Scope
What I delivered, and what I’m not claiming.
- Product UX/UI for Wirescan’s cable-diagnostics and maintenance interfaces, August 2024 to December 2025.
- Brand applications for Wirescan.
- Modular components for inspection data and status, reused across screen and spatial views.
- A wind-farm digital-twin prototype with cable health, diagnostics, turbine inspection and AR.
The wind-farm twin uses simulated data and is not a live monitoring system or a validated predictive-maintenance model. The Unity, WebXR and AR work are prototypes, not a deployed Wirescan product. No operational or financial results are claimed.
Industrial data becomes useful when it reads like a colleague’s note: what changed, where, how serious, and what to do about it.