Product Design
2020
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Projects
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Services
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Project Name
PlanYou Software Suite
Headquarters
Kamp-Lintfort, NRW
Industry
Petrochemical
Company size
20 – 50
Timeline
2017-2020
PlanYou is a digital transformation project in the field of industrial maintenance work. Most of the maintenance work in German industrial parks is done by on the ground inspections. Those workers are doing plannings and tracking with analoge tools like flip charts and pen and paper. This data has to be entered into digital databases by hand. This is where PlanYou comes in: it eliminates the need for a middle man and tracks the data directly digital in the field. This also opens up the opportunity to give real time information of the operations to the team management.
By using PlanYou maintenance teams can enhance their performance and accuracy which is crucial in an environment where mistakes in maintenance can be life endangering. It also provides a necessary transparency across teams and into management while also feeding the database directly avoiding a crucial SPOF.
Services provided
PlanYou was entirely designed by me, at first in a freelancer role and later as lead designer at CODUCT (today: CODUCT Solutions GmbH). In my process I executed the entire human centered design process from beginnings to final UI design touches. My role was in constant contact with the target group and the engineering team as well as the different stakeholders.
Project brief and research
We were introduced to this project by a consultant company tasked with enhancing the performance of an industrial maintenance team in the petrochemical industry. They successfully introduced a scrum like method building on kanban as their main tool.
The main task was to create a digital version of said kanban board with some individual features based on location and tracking numbers of the task items. We iterated on a kanban board made for a 60 inch multitouch screen. Conducting user interviews and focus group discussions on the ground in the industrial complex.
I also joined the maintenance workers in their daily task on the complex and finding a solution for their pen and paper approach.
UX Design
For outlining the application flow I created user journeys and user flows that mapped their daily tasks. Out of this I developed wireframes and small prototypes to simulate the individual functions in the application like the item detail view and several map based components.
This process had to be done for all platforms that had very different form factors and use cases. One finding on the UWP that still stands out to me was the idea of dragging and dropping "marker pins" across the kanban board. In testing we found out that dragging actions like this on screens the size of boards was too difficult for the users and the hardware at that time (infrared based). So we build a new solution with quick actions on the indivdual items.
In order to evaluate the use of our UWP on the big screen we also made use of eyetracking sessions with our target group. By using this method we found several overview problems that could have not been found before.
UI Design
Since the main use case was the use on the UWP application the design followed this device as target device. This gave the application the necessary business character that run through all platforms. Component based libraries in design tooling at that time was not available at that time so I ended up creating a style guide for PlanYou. Based on the style guide I could form a coherent visual language across all platforms.
The outcome was a project management and tracking app for Windows, iOS and web, an inspection app for iOS on iPads and a location based item tracker for iOS on iPhones.
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