Energy & Utlities

Clearing the path for better power

How we helped Sharper Shape turn powerline inspections into a digital advantage

Digital Products & Platforms

NoA Ignite — The digital consultancy that delivers

Challenge
Powerline inspections relied largely on manual activities – visual checks and climbing to poles to assess condition of equipment. The process was slow, costly, and often left critical risks unnoticed.
Solution
Together with Sharper Shape, we built user-driven tools integrated with their multisensor unit and cloud platform. An iOS app supports different roles in smarter ways of working: pilots see flight paths and communicate with operators, ground inspectors capture photos and annotations, and drone pilots inspect poles with ease. All results flow into one platform, where analysts review point-cloud data and thousands of images quickly and accurately.
Impact
Inspections are now safer, quicker, and more precise. Crews work with less strain. Companies plan with more confidence. And communities benefit from more reliable power.

Behind every light switch is a fragile network of powerlines, stretched across forests, fields, and continents. They face storms, stress, and slow decay. Keeping them safe has always been essential—and always been difficult.

For decades, inspections meant walking or driving along transmission corridors with binoculars and cameras to visually assess poles, wires, insulators and vegetation clearances. Climbing for closer examinations. Helicopters covering larger distances for basic visual surveys. It was slow, costly, and full of blind spots. Small cracks were missed. Big risks slipped through.

Sharper Shape set out to change all of it. Their vision; equip helicopters with a powerful, multi-sensor data capturing unit, use drones where they matter, and develop smart software to connect the workflow and spot problems earlier, faster, and safer. Our job? Make that vision usable. Design tools that help turn overwhelming data into clear, confident action. And help in building them.

Built with the people who use it

We worked closely with Sharper Shape to design tools built for real-world use. Not just assumptions. The process began with a journalistic approach. We interviewed teams across the company, mapped goals from the ground up, and translated insights into clear design decisions.

From there, the solution started to take form. We created a suite of products to support both crews in the field and analysts behind the screen.

We designed and built an iOS app that allows helicopter pilots to follow flight paths with ease and streamline communications with operators. The app also helps ground inspectors and drone pilots assess poles and annotate with ease. We also designed a data viewer that pulls all inspection results into one unified space.

To leverage the vast amount of data, we designed Inspector—a specialized web-based tool made for powerline analysts who review masses of point-cloud data and thousands of images every day. Surfacing potential risks thanks to advanced image processing and machine learning.

The Inspector wasn’t built to be simple. It was built to be powerful. Think of it like a professional grade editing tool, designed specifically for experts. Every control was shaped to support their speed, focus, and accuracy.

To boost performance, we added 20 custom shortcuts inspired by high-speed gaming. With hotkeys for scanning, zooming, and navigating, every second saved at each step added up. Review time dropped. Fatigue dropped. And precision improved across the board.