Design for Aspen Simulators

Aspen Plus + HYSYS — Modernizing the “Crown Jewel” Simulator Experience

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Case Study Snapshot

• Role: Senior Director of Product Design (program lead)

  
  

• Scope: Redesign of key desktop workflows (flowsheets + property packages) to improve learnability and productivity in complex, high-stakes simulation work.

  
  

• Users: Process engineers, modelers, chemical engineers (build/run models, configure property packages, troubleshoot convergence, collaborate on models/results).

  
  

• Team + timeline: Led a cross-functional team of 2 product designers, 1 lead UX researcher, 3 PMs, and ~10 developers over 2 years.

  
  

• What we did: Built a new interaction model, Figma prototypes, and a component library to deliver speed + clarity without sacrificing power-user depth (guided paths + expert controls), with accessibility/compliance as non-negotiables

• Outcomes

  • 50% reduction in training time

  • +30% increase in NPS

  • CEO award recognition for strategic impact

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Context:

Aspen Plus and HYSYS are AspenTech’s flagship simulators—core to how process engineers and chemical modelers build, run, and validate high-stakes plant and safety scenarios. This product line represented roughly $450M in annual revenue (Revenue figure based on internal estimates at the time) within AspenTech’s broader business.

Problem:

The desktop experience—especially flowsheets and property package workflows—had become a liability: legacy frameworks, slow performance, and accumulated UX defects made the tools hard to learn, difficult to navigate at scale, and frustrating on complex models. Discoverability was poor, screens were dense, and productivity often depended on guidance from senior engineers. Business impact showed up as support tickets, crashing, slower adoption, and renewal risk.

Users + jobs-to-be-done:

Primary users were process engineers, modelers, and chemical engineers working through workflows like:

• Building and running simulation models

• Configuring property packages

• Iterating on distillation and safety-related scenarios

• Troubleshooting “does the model converge?”

• Sharing and collaborating on models and results

My role:

As Senior Director of Product Design, I led the redesign across a cross-functional team of 2 product designers, 1 lead UX researcher, 3 PMs, and ~10 developers over two years.

Approach:

We rebuilt the experience around clarity and speed without sacrificing power-user depth:

• Conducted contextual inquiry, interviews, and usability testing with real engineers

• Created a new interaction model, Figma prototypes, and a component library to drive consistency

• Designed workflows that served novices and power users in the same system (guided paths + efficient expert controls)

• Kept safety/compliance and accessibility as non-negotiable constraints throughout

• Key insight(s): 

  • We learned that new users didn't consult documentation

  • People want to be "guided" even if they are experienced

  • Clarity without reducing power, progressive disclosure, scalable navigation for complex models, “always recoverable” error states

• Decision tradeoffs: Legibility overrode data density always. Speed was something end-users could handle. They were used to waiting for long-periods of time, but we did everything to speed it up where possible

What we changed:

• Flowsheet navigation + selection model: reduced time spent hunting objects in large models

• Property package setup flow: reduced setup errors and made “what to do next” obvious

• Convergence troubleshooting surfaces: made failure states diagnosable without a senior “guide”

Outcomes:

• 50% reduction in training time (faster onboarding, less reliance on senior “guides”)

• +30% increase in NPS

• Faster, more accurate end-to-end workflows with improved scalability for extremely complex models

• Recognized with a CEO award for moving the needle on a major strategic program

How we measured:

• Training time: Compared to the standard training time of around 6 months, we shortened this to a few weeks

• NPS: baseline period + post-release period

Why it mattered:

This wasn’t a reskin. It was turning a legacy, business-critical desktop product into a modern, learnable, scalable system—protecting renewals, improving adoption, and strengthening one of AspenTech’s most valuable revenue engines.