Transforming Technical Complexity into Market Clarity
The Challenge: A geospatial AI startup with breakthrough technology needed a digital presence that matched its technical sophistication. Site instability, unclear positioning, and inconsistent branding were hindering partnership opportunities during critical conference season.
The Impact: Transformed GeoMate's digital presence into a strategic asset—delivering
a scalable brand system and high-performance website that doubled engagement,
achieved zero downtime during conference season, and enabled marketing
autonomy for faster content development.
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The impact
My role
As the lead product designer, I was responsible for strategy, execution, and technical implementation—from competitive analysis and stakeholder alignment to design system creation, Webflow development, and post-launch optimization.
Strategic Foundation
Understanding the market gap
To define GeoMate's positioning, I analyzed 12 competitors across the geospatial AI landscape, mapping them by technical approach and market focus.
Understanding the market gap
Direct competitors(DeepMap, HERE Technologies, TomTom) offer comprehensive HD mapping but focus exclusively on autonomous driving and rely on expensive LiDAR-based collection methods.
Specialized providers (Ecopia AI, Nearmap) deliver high-quality geospatial data for urban planning or real estate but lack the semantic layers and simulation integration required for AD applications.
Simulation platforms(Applied Intuition, dSPACE) provide testing environments but depend on third-party map data sources.
GeoMate's whitespace: Simultaneously serving both AD and urban planning markets through an AI-powered pipeline (imagery → HD maps → simulation environments)—delivering comparable quality at 70% lower cost than LiDAR alternatives.
The disconnect
GeoMate was speaking to two completely different audiences with the same generic messaging. The existing map visualizations failed to show:
Autonomous driving engineers
How semantic mapping differs from traditional providers.
Urban planners
How AI-extracted data surpasses basic satellite imagery.
My challenge was to transform this one-size-fits-all approach into distinct visual and content experiences that speak directly to each client's needs.
The Constraint That Shaped Strategy
Timeline
GeoMate's website instability was impacting prospect interactions as the team prepared for upcoming industry conferences. With 17 existing pages and 40+ blog posts, redesigning everything wasn't feasible.
I facilitated a prioritization workshop with founders and business leads, using three criteria: revenue impact, differentiation value, and segment clarity. Through this collaborative process, we aligned on launching 7 core pages first: Homepage, AD Solutions, Urban Planning Solutions, Technology, About us, and Contact us.
Balancing speed with foundation
I proposed spending the first 2-3 weeks building a design system basic before tackling page layouts. The founders initially wanted to jump straight into redesigning pages given the urgency. I explained that without consistent foundations, we'd end up reworking completed pages and the marketing team would stay dependent on design support. After weighing the trade-offs, we agreed the upfront investment would save time long-term.
This proved valuable
The design system enabled the marketing team to produce branded content independently within a month of launch, and we avoided the redesign cycles that typically occur when working without systematic foundations.
Design System as Business Enabler
Building the foundation
The brand refresh wasn't about aesthetics—it was about establishing technical credibility through visual consistency.
Color & accessibility: Built a complete color architecture (primary, secondary, functional, and grayscale palettes) with every combination tested to pass WCAG AA contrast standards.
Typography: Consolidated to Poppins across all weights, chosen for its alignment with GeoMate's logo and clarity for technical content. Established a responsive type scale based on an 8px baseline grid.
Brand standards: Created comprehensive logo guidelines (monochrome, gradient, and glyph variants) with spacing rules and context-specific usage (web vs print).
Systematic foundations: Defined shadows, spacing tokens, grid framework (8px system), and basic icon library. All organized as a Figma library for team access.
I focused on foundational elements over extensive UI components given timeline constraints, with plans to expand the library during the product phase.
Information Architecture: Meeting Users Where They Are
Homepage strategy
The homepage redesign focused on communicating GeoMate's unique capability: a multi-layered AI pipeline that transforms geospatial imagery into specialized mapping solutions for different industries.
Rather than forcing visitors to choose between industries immediately, I designed the homepage to first establish the core technology platform, then guide visitors to relevant applications.
The hero section visualizes the "layered data" concept— showing how GeoMate's AI processes multiple data layers in an integrated system. Below, three distinct pathways invite exploration: Urban Planning, Autonomous Driving, or Simulation Environment.
Visual differentiation
The critical design challenge was making each industry offering immediately clear to its audience. I explored various design approaches before developing distinct visual languages for each landing page—matching how AD engineers and urban planners think about mapping data differently.
Isometric city views with colorful infrastructure labels (sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks). The approachable aesthetic emphasizes civic connectivity and public access. Hero messaging focused on "Smarter Cities" and practical municipal challenges—incomplete sidewalk networks, accessibility gaps, manual survey costs.
Dark mode, vector-style rendering without satellite imagery—mirroring in-vehicle HMI interfaces that AD engineers use daily. Semantic annotations highlight traffic rules, lane markers, and road topology. Hero messaging emphasized technical specifications: centimeter-level accuracy, lightweight data models, integration with simulation platforms (CARLA, SUMO).
3D rendering with low-poly urban corridors, vehicles, and pedestrians. The "RealSimE" branding positioned this as a distinct product, demonstrating how HD map data becomes testable virtual environments for platforms like CARLA, dSPACE, and RoadRunner.
Technical Execution: WordPress to Webflow
Platform migration
With WordPress causing stability issues, the team evaluated Builder.io and Webflow for the rebuild.
I recommended Webflow because Builder.io required ongoing developer support—impractical for our 4-person engineering team focused on product work. Webflow let me handle everything independently: translating Figma designs into responsive layouts, setting up CMS, and configuring integrations. This freed engineering resources while preserving design quality.
Key learnings
