Information
It's definitely important to have it. However, it makes the most sense when you have the ability to draw insights by creating helpful assets.
The client was a major North American locomotive and freight operator. We had to understand the current state of all the applications and users and illustrate our findings to build a new suite of products and features.
The Problem:
We conducted a series of interviews with product owners, system operators, and mechanical crews to understand their roles and functionalities. We then delivered detailed customer journey maps and personas highlighting our findings and insights to the PMO team.
The Solution:
Here's some quick context on this case study.
Here's some quick context on this case study.
DISCOVERY
Here's some quick context on this case study
I worked alongside a team of designers, SAP specialists, developers, and others to create and enhance applications for simplified locomotive maintenance operations​
01
The client on this project worked using a Dual-Track agile process of Discovery and Delivery​.
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The goal was to do all of the discovery out front (Research, Interviews, CJMs, Low-Fidelity Designs, Information Architecture, and User Testing) and get buy-in from all of the critical stakeholders before transitioning the work to the Delivery Process.
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Once in the delivery process, we would further refine the agreed-upon flow and designs from the discovery track to patch holes and expand on missing details​
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This process was done by working closely with the lead UI and backend developers to ensure what was created was feasible in an SAP-backed environment​
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The outcome was a clear vision for the product before it ever reached the hands of the development team, and that work could be queued up in the backlog and picked up with minimal churn at a designated time
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Project Dynamics
Team
1 UX Researcher and Service Designer- Me
1 Lead UX Researcher
1 Senior Designer
Client
A major freight company based in the United States.
Timeline
Discovery and research effort- About 5 months
The process
Interviews
Interviewing users and understanding their workflow. Narrowing down their pain points and taking in their feedback.
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Personas
Interviewing users, understanding their pain points, and creating detailed personas. The personas have critical information that will provide context about the user profile, roles and responsibilities, and the type of applications being used.
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Journey map
Laying out the entire process and workflow of features. Create callouts and understand how to highlight the data points with key opportunities.
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Feedback
Working with users to get feedback on existing applications and V.1 release of the new applications to provide insights to business stakeholders for improvements.
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Interviews
I scheduled, conducted, and sat on several interviews with product owners and the respective functional leads. Through these interviews, I could lay out detailed personas and customer maps. We were also able to create different user types and get detailed insights for each. This entire process was highly beneficial in creating the new software.
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The personas and customer journey maps that were created from those interviews are below.
1. Systems Operations Center (SOC)
Persona and Journey Map (Below)
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This user type is involved in high-level locomotive issues and in diagnosing the same by working with individual shops.
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He is involved with making decisions for locomotive maintenance, creating reports, and providing support to mechanical crews (MOC) as needed.​
2. User type: Reliability
Persona and Journey Map (Below)
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This user type is with the reliability team, which is involved with supporting the Mechanical Operations Center (MOC) and is a high-level user for locomotives across locations
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His duties involve assessing locomotives that consistently break down and diagnosing locomotives that have previously experienced issues, also known as second offenders.
3. User type: Locomotive search
Persona and Journey Map (Below)
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The user type is a high-level shop supervisor.​
His duties involve assessing locomotives that consistently break down and diagnosing locomotives that have previously experienced issues, also known as second offenders.
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He's responsible for addressing locomotive maintenance issues in his specific shop and also plans the overall workflow for this purpose.
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He utilizes a feature known as live view, which provides him with a high-level view of locomotives present in other shops.
Feedback and training
As a part of the project, I also had to assist with training users to use and deploy our new suite of applications. It gave me the chance to collect valuable feedback and user insights.
PARTING THOUGHTS
A reasonable conclusion of why these assets make sense.
01
While this process is an ongoing effort, the discovery process has helped us understand and narrow down on important data points needed to create a strong suite of applications​
02
Most stakeholders other than product owners are unfamiliar with locomotive maintenance and the range of applications, functions, and data that are involved; the discovery process provides a whole lot of insight into the same and highlights the existing synergy ​
03
The journey maps provide a visual aid of all functions being performed and helpful indicators of where the experience is lacking and needs improvement.​
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Personas are helpful in providing context and understanding the users better, and what applications are crucial for their functions ​
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Overall, the discovery efforts were widely appreciated and supported by the clients, as they provided new insights and gave opportunities to experience the difference provided by design-led thinking.
A reasonable conclusion of why these assets make sense.
A reasonable conclusion of why these assets make sense.