Work — Marcel McVay

01

ROLE UX Lead → Acting Design Director

DOMAIN Defense-tech · Collaborative autonomy

YEAR 2024–2025

STATUS NDA-bound

>_HavocControl

Havoc needed a command interface for fleets of autonomous surface vessels, in two months, for a live Navy and DIU demonstration. I started where I always start in high-cognitive-load domains: games. RTS titles had spent decades solving this problem. The real breakthrough came from a mobile title and what it taught about switching between individual agents and fleet-level overview on a small screen. The fleet performed flawlessly on site. Supported a $7M seed, then a $15M raise, then an $85M round.

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02

ROLE Design Lead

DOMAIN Maritime + Aviation HMI

YEAR 2024

STATUS NDA-bound

>_Regent Craft — Sea-Glider Cockpit Interface

Regent Craft was building a ground-effect vessel, not quite a plane and not quite a boat, and brought us in to design the cockpit. The brief was a designer's dream. The test pilot grounded us fast. Every concept we showed him was wrong: not because it was unpolished, but because it wasn't where his body expected it to be. The outcome was a masterclass in when not to innovate, and what fluency actually means in a mission-critical interface.

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03

ROLE Design Lead & UX Strategist

DOMAIN Energy · Enterprise software

YEAR Multi-year

STATUS NDA-bound

>_Utilidata — Grid-Edge AI Platform

Utilidata built AI that runs at the grid edge, inside the meter, interpreting power waveforms in real time. The challenge was making it legible to an industry that moves slowly, thinks in regulatory geographies, and doesn't trust what it can't see in production. We built two products simultaneously: a production-ready platform and a high-fidelity demo environment. In regulated markets, the demo isn't a shortcut. It's the prerequisite. Supported capital raises and a strategic partnership with NVIDIA.

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04

ROLE UX Design Lead

DOMAIN Industrial HMI · Manufacturing

YEAR Multi-year

STATUS Public

>_DCC Jogbox — Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence

Coordinate Measurement Machines are the quality assurance backbone of precision manufacturing. The operator workflow hadn't meaningfully changed in decades. We redesigned it as a single handheld device for Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence. Field research took us to SpaceX, Panavision, and Airbus and Boeing suppliers, watching people do precision work in environments that demanded precision from us in return. The UX was right. The product design was right. It was a lesson in what happens when those things are true but the business strategy underneath them isn't fully aligned.

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05

ROLE Solo Designer (MVP) → Lead Designer

DOMAIN Manufacturing · Enterprise software

YEAR 2017–2020

STATUS Public

>_Hexagon SmartFactory — Asset Management at Scale

Hexagon SmartFactory asset management dashboard

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence needed visibility into hundreds of quality control machines simultaneously. The first solution was a wall of color-coded status indicators. Operators called it the Christmas tree. We inverted the problem: instead of showing everything, surface only what needs attention. Asset Manager shipped to enterprise, became the seed for a broader product suite, and spun out a company still operating today, nearly a decade later.

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06

ROLE Research, IA, design & build

DOMAIN Design research · Interface criticism

YEAR 2026–

STATUS Public · self-initiated

>_FUI Archive

Fictional user interfaces are speculative design smuggled into popular culture. They set expectations for what computing feels like a decade before the product arrives. Most reference archives treat them as decoration. This one reads each interface as a designed artifact with a logic, a lineage, and a political charge.

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