Challenge
We started this project to design a digital system to replace good old pen&paper, and eliminate the obstructions auditors meet while performing industrial security audits and writing reports.
We wanted to simplify the complications users encounter and provide a solution to perform tasks seamlessly.
My Role
I worked on this project as UX and UI Designer.
I conducted user research and user tests, prepared flows, wireframes and user interface.
Hakan Kurt from TarafTech Pirmasens Office worked as software developer and Georg Schütz from Kamux GmbH worked as software developer and project manager.
Discover: Research and Users
In this project we were lucky to be able to work with actual people who will use this product when it’s released. And as an engineer, I was once doing the same job professionally so I was familiar with the target users’ everyday struggle, most of their problems and needs. But I didn’t want to drift away with my own opinions and take false actions so I started interviewing users. Georg helped us for the interview of the auditors in Germany while I was interviewing their collegues in Turkey.
There are two main groups: In-house engineers and Auditors who work for government or risk engineers audits for companies like insurance, etc. I will call the second group ‘agents’. In-house engineers are responsible for keeping their company’s facilities safe and ready for government audits. Agents visit different facilities everyday and audit them.
We prepared journey maps, discovered their work process and uncovered their pain points first. Then we worked on scenarios to make sure we didn’t miss any aspects of the job . We defined the real problems they face and what tasks they really need to accomplish.
We discovered that auditors usually carry paper-and-pencil and a camera to take notes and photos during the visit of industrial facilities and all kinds of work areas to assess risks that may cause damage. After the visit, they need to prepare a technical report from the notes and photos. In case their colleagues’ or interns’ help needed to fill the report, they often find auditor’s handwriting in the notes hard to decipher which cause them to lose a lot of time.
Ideation: Scope, Information Architecture, User Flows
According to research findings, we held some brainstorming sessions over video calls and we figured what actions the users must take, what elements they need to use and what features are crucial for the first release.
Users needed to create and find company profiles, associate the audits with companies, start audits, create facility structures, define risks and assess them, and finally take a report.
I started to drew user flows and scenarios to share with the team for the next sessions. After a few sessions we had some solid user flows and task flow including error messages, empty states, etc.
Iteration: Sketches, Wireframes, Prototyping
I started to wireframing ideas on paper first, then I transfered them to Sketch with a rapid wireframing kit. After all functions and features are set on lo-fi wireframes, I documented them with notes and annonations and sent them to Hakan and Georg to examine, and we made some minor changes. Then we added the wireframe to rapid prototyping used for short user testing sessions.
Final Design: User Interface and User Tests
Since I am not a graphic or interface designer, this may be the most challenging task for me in this project. I researched and examined interfaces for inspiration, sketched and iterated over and over until I am satisfied with the results.
I designed interface elements and screens to be consistent and coherent. I payed attention to whitespaces and distances to be multiples of 8px as 8-16-32-64-128 and 160.
Conclusion
The real challenge for me was to design a such complex system with many functions and details. This led me to take bigger care for research, to dig more about the users. And it took me a bit more than usual to find solutions about connecting between features and functions.
Another minor challenge was to designing for tablet screens for the first time I quickly realised I was so used to design for smartphones, big screens of tablets made every thing huge and I understood that I wasn’t using the screen efficiently. Then I started to drawing wireframes from scratch to fit more usable functions in the screen.