ACT Online Designer

About

The ACT Online Designer (designer.actbuildingsystems.com) is ACT Building Systems’ web application for designing and configuring building-systems projects in the browser. The experience targets current browsers and explicitly drops legacy Internet Explorer, steering users toward up-to-date, secure environments for interactive design work.

Highlights

• Rendering Complex 3D Models in Browser: Large building models created heavy performance loads. Solved using GPU acceleration, level-of-detail rendering (LOD), and progressive loading for smoother experiences.
• Concurrent Collaboration: Designing with multiple users simultaneously introduced data conflicts. We built real-time sync via WebSockets with conflict resolution logic to maintain consistency.
• Integration with Legacy CAD/BIM Tools: Engineers required exports into existing workflows. We implemented export pipelines for compatibility with standard formats like DWG, IFC, and Revit.
• Scalable Backend Performance: Running intensive calculations for validation and analytics required strong backend performance. .NET Core microservices were optimized with caching and async processing to handle high loads.
• User Onboarding & Adoption: Complex tools can overwhelm users. We addressed this by providing templates, guided onboarding, and drag-and-drop workflows to reduce the learning curve.

Tech Stack