AVA AI Ecosystem Platform

Nokia's AVA platform serves 150+ telecom operators worldwide. When I came in, every solution on the platform had its own navigation, its own components, its own information architecture. Engineers were relearning the interface every time they switched tools. Operations that should have been routine were slow because the software kept getting in the way.

I was the only designer, working across teams in Finland, the US, Poland, and the Philippines. The brief was to unify everything into one system. The result was a shared design language and pattern library that cut operational friction by 60%.

The Problem

Telecoms run on complexity, and Nokia's platform had grown to reflect that. Every new solution built its own information architecture, its own navigation patterns, its own component set. The result was a platform that felt like a collection of separate applications rather than one coherent system.

Network engineers working across multiple solutions had to re-learn navigation, re-interpret data hierarchies, and re-adapt to inconsistent interaction patterns. Every time they moved between tools. This friction was costing operators real time in high-stakes environments.

My Role

Lead UX Designer · Sole designer across 4 international teams

I owned the full design process, from discovery with network engineers to final specs handed to engineering teams across four countries. That meant flying to Finland, Poland, and the Philippines to run workshops with local stakeholders on UX heuristics and accessibility.

The work spanned information architecture, navigation design, core component system, and extensive design templates that any solution team could follow.

Process: User Flows & IA

Before designing anything, I mapped how users actually moved through complex network management tasks. The domain learning was non-negotiable. Designing for telecom operations without understanding the workflows produces interfaces engineers don't trust.

I established a procedure for creating information structures and user pathways for every solution type, so new teams had a clear, replicable process rather than starting from zero.

Information Architecture

The core of the work was defining a unified information architecture that all solutions could adopt. This meant establishing clear hierarchy rules: what constitutes a perspective, a first-level view, a second-level view, and how horizontal navigation tabs should interact with object hierarchies.

Navigation Patterns

Creating structured navigational strategies was vital as the platform evolved. Users needed to move between functional modules, navigate in and out of object hierarchies, and use breadcrumbs to maintain context, all consistently across every solution.

I documented every navigation pattern with annotated UI specs so engineering teams across all four locations could implement consistently without needing a designer present.

Core Components

With IA and navigation patterns established, I built the component library: buttons, toggles, toggles, sliders, chips, functional module tabs, and multi-thumb sliders. Every component was documented with all states, variants, and usage rules so teams could build without reinventing decisions.

Workshop Facilitations

I conducted design thinking, Lightning Decision Jam, and Design Sprint workshops both in Finland and the Philippines, training local stakeholders on UX heuristics and accessibility so the design thinking could scale beyond me.

The goal wasn't just to design the system. It was to build the organisation's capacity to maintain and extend it without a central designer as a bottleneck.

Good enterprise UX disappears. The operator doesn't think about the interface, they think about the network. That's what I was designing toward.