From e-commerce to education, light is often left out of the configurator equation. Given its impact on an object’s look and a user’s mood, this overlooked variable has real utility and cost effects. I applied my design experience with enterprise configurators to build Light Dropper, a dedicated 3D lighting reference tool. Early use cases have already validated the MVP and provided the roadmap for the high-fidelity evolution shown here.

I’m not building a legacy configurator for part-swapping. I’m creating a new category of tool and this commercial use case is just one example. Users can control everything from a light’s type to its shape, color, brightness, and position, making professional setups like rim and three-point lighting dead simple. Even if only for pre-visualization, any stakeholder can light a product, angle it, and drop it into a campaign like a pro.

With any product experience, collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback is necessary to get a holistic understanding of what’s working and what’s not. I initially included an open-ended feedback form tucked in the corner. While some early responses were encouraging, the ratio of traffic to actual submissions was low. I realized a core user experience heuristic was at issue: the blank page problem.

By switching to predefined questions, I removed that friction and saw feedback volume increase ~300%. However, some highly requested features implemented were rarely used. This process serves as an ongoing reminder that users can’t always predict their own needs. I’ve learned to balance direct feedback with hard analytics and my own intuition to decide what actually makes the cut.

It’s baffling how often designers default to the most complex solutions first. As AI empowers us to build what we weren’t capable of before, real expertise isn’t being able to build everything, it’s understanding what to build in the first place.

I chose to lean on the modern browser to make Light Dropper a reality. Adding and moving lights, changing colors, and shifting cameras all happen right in the browser. This web-driven strategy slashes the friction of software downloads and solves for cross-platform distribution. Guided by my design expertise, I bridged the gap using Figma, the Pro versions of Gemini and ChatGPT, and Webflow.

The goal of product design is solving problems in the simplest effective way possible, even at scale. Sometimes that means building a focused experience first before you try to scale up. The minimum viable product was built on that exact premise. Version 2, which you just previewed, is coming soon. This MVP approach is exactly how I can take your project from idea to impressions too.