SketchUp Add Location
Bringing the real world into SketchUp:
Eliminating the friction in site setup
Overview
In 2023, I led the redesign of Add Location in SketchUp to transform how architects and designers incorporate site context into their models.
Our customers depend on geolocation and real-world context to organise, inform and visualise their designs, yet the legacy workflow wasn't fit for purpose. Confusing UX and limited, low-quality content wasted user time and caused costly project delays. By focusing on real-world team workflows and expanding our site content, we turned a cumbersome utility into a seamless, high-satisfaction foundation for every project.
Commercial Goals
Strengthen our leading conceptual design positioning.
Provide a greater incentive for legacy users of our older perpetual license software to upgrade to a subscription.
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Before
Unclear, high friction with poor content
Project Summary
My Role
As the sole designer on the team, I took the project through discovery, definition, design and launch. I conducted all user research, defined the information architecture, and crafted the complete UX and UI.
Beyond core interaction design, I influenced the product entitlement strategy—shaping the features available across subscription tiers.
It was a uniquely complex challenge that required rethinking the entire interaction model, navigating intricate technical constraints, and creating custom, map-based interactions from the ground up.
Team
1 PMs, 1 UX/UI(Me), 3 engineers.
Design Methods
Surveys, interviews, design workshops, JTBD, prototyping, usability testing, A/B testing and analysis.
After
Clear, effortless with good content
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Strategy & Vision
Given this project was about improving an existing feature, we needed to know which jobs users were trying to use the feature for and how well the feature was currently serving those jobs.
Practitioner survey: Quantifying existing needs and pain points around geolocation and using site context on projects.
Contextual Inquiries: Observing users walkthrough their current or past projects to understand workflows and real-world contexts.
Heuristic review: Systematically assessing the existing feature using common design principals to identify potential issues.
Usability testing: Watching participants try and complete realistic jobs using the existing feature to identify hidden friction points.
Analytics review: Studying usage interval, content engagement, retention, drop-off and signs of friction.
Competitor analysis: Comparing, using and discussing with users competitor products.
Research
I led several research initiatives, including:
The research revealed that being able to geolocate your model and import site context were critical for many key architectural design workflows, but the current UX had many usability issues and poor content, that was severely frustrating users, costing them time or worse leading them to make mistakes.
The opportunity: It was clear we could greatly improve user's satisfaction and their project outcomes with a revamped version of Add Location. Users needed a better UX that mitigated errors, but also better content, with more control over characteristics like resolution and style as well as additional content.
Insights
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UX Framework
Mission
Provide designers with everything necessary to accurately locate their projects, understand site context, and visualize their designs in real-world surroundings.
Strategy
Make geolocation easy and accurate. Provide rich, usable site context that meaningfully informs design decisions and delivers compelling visualisations.
Prioritised JTBD we decided to serve
1
Visualise a design in it's surroundings. As an architect or designer needing to win client confidence, give me rich site context for my 3D model so that I can clearly demonstrate how well the project integrates into its surrounding environment.
2
Learn about the site. As an architect or designer getting started on a new project, give me key site details—such as zoning, terrain, access, and local amenities—so that I can easily factor site constraints and opportunities into my early design process.
3
Study the sun's impact. As an architect or designer evaluating site conditions or studying the impact on and from my proposed design, give me accurate site context in sufficient detail so that I can perform reliable shadow studies.
4
Site planning. As an architect or designer developing a site plan, give me give me detailed site context so that I can evaluate existing conditions, design site interventions, and clearly communicate proposed changes to clients and planners.
5
Coordinating multiple models. As a BIM manager or design coordinator overseeing a large project, give me a way to ensure individual files are accurately geolocated so that I can easily aggregate models from different designers into a master file without positioning errors or manual realignments.
I defined the UX framework below to help us prioritise, keep us aligned and inform our solutions.
Experience Goals
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Key Design Challenges
The legacy workflow had many issues, requiring a complete overhaul to make it clear and intuitive.
Additional capabilities were also needed to ensure we fully supported user’s jobs and mitigated confusion and errors around model orientation.
Making Geolocation Frictionless
Adding method selection made it clear that address wasn't the only method available. We also added a third method so users could geolocate using a coordinate reference system.
Adding a geolocation pin and north arrow to the modelling view so users have clear persistent references which designing.
Restructuring the flow to make geolocation step one and adding context or reference points optional additional steps.
Adding the ability to position and orient the model at the same time as geolocating so everything is set up correctly.
Improvements included:
During the redesign, a disagreement emerged around how to set the site orientation: should the map rotate around the building, or should the building rotate over the map?
The Product Manager favoured rotating the map to reflect setting a True North offset. However, I advocated for rotating the building. I felt users would find it more intuitive to think in terms of placing and orienting their model within an environment, not turning the world around their structure. Additionally rotating the map manually in SketchUp was already how some users were causing themselves problems misaligning the map with north.
To settle the debate, I built basic prototypes and ran quick usability tests. The results confirmed my hypothesis: users found rotating the building far more intuitive and significantly less confusing.
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Resolving the orientation debate
Giving people what they need
Beyond content selection and quality improvements, the context import workflow offered some great opportunities for delight.
Moving from a menu to site configuration. Introducing new site context like buildings, trees, and waterbodies offered immediate value by mitigating the need to model manually.
However, each new addition forced users to repeatedly choose between flat or elevated placement options. Since many users needed both, adding more content risked creating a clunky, repetitive workflow.
To solve this, I suggested we move away from presenting purely a menu of content to providing a meaningful choice around site model. I restructured the import process around the site style itself. Users simply choose their target site style—flat, elevated, or both—and then select the context elements they need. Because all context is organized by tags, switching between flat and elevated styles directly within SketchUp remains seamless.
Enabling import of truly large sites. Analytics and interviews had showed that many users would repeat the import workflow more than 10 times in order to bring in a big enough area of map or terrain. Not only did this take time, but it was error prone. Without any indication of the previous imported regions users would often end up with gaps or overlaps in their context. Overlaps would bloat the model and cause visual artefacts, so the whole process was very frustrating.
I'm pleased to say I managed to persuade the team to make the extra effort to allow a user to select a region size as large as they liked with us doing the hard work behind the scenes to break it up appropriately for import.
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Making it possible to mix resolution. Importing large areas of maps and terrain adds a lot of data to SketchUp and slows performance. I designed the import workflow with mixed resolutions specifically in mind. This made it easy for users to import higher resolution context for a small area directly around their site and then lower resolution for everything further out where the detail wasn't necessary. This wasn't achievable with the existing feature.
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Keeping users organised. Adding more context options—alongside flat and elevated site styles—meant organisation was critical. Because workflows require frequently toggling context on and off for visual clarity or quick editing, we structured imports with smart grouping and tagging. This makes controlling visibility and accessing content effortless directly in the model.
Designing for how people really work
To truly support how people work, we had to anchor the experience in their day-to-day reality. That meant designing for diverse team structures, collaborative touch-points, and the constant need for swift, frictionless adjustments.
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Making changes effortless. With the original tool, modifying resolution or expanding context required deleting the existing model and trying to manually redraw the same region. I eliminated this friction by introducing an import history view with snappable boundaries. By automatically locking the starting point to the user’s previous selection, updating or extending site context is now effortless and precise.
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Making collaboration seamless. On larger projects, sites are often divided among multiple designers and later recombined for final presentations. This requires site coordinators to ensure every file is aligned correctly. To support this workflow, we added a detailed summary view where anyone on the team can quickly verify geolocation status and metadata, ensuring site accuracy before merging files.
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The Outcome
Eliminated User Confusion: Usability testing and analytics showed users were easily able to perform core tasks without confusion.
Significant increase in Satisfaction: CSAT scores climbed from 3.0 to 4.6 out of 5.
Increased Engagement: Analytics showed a marked lift in feature retention alongside strong, sustained adoption of new site content.
By restructuring the Add Location workflow around real-world contexts and expanding our content offering, we fundamentally improved the user experience and enabled better project outcomes.
Key results include: