Locomotive maintenance software
Railways play a critical role in every modern economy.
While North America is famously car-centric for people, it relies on its railways to facilitate the transportation of goods across its vast distances.
Locomotive maintenance software
Railways play a critical role in every modern economy.
While North America is famously car-centric for people, it relies on its railways to facilitate the transportation of goods across its vast distances.
Locomotive maintenance software
Railways play a critical role in every modern economy.
While North America is famously car-centric for people, it relies on its railways to facilitate the transportation of goods across its vast distances.
The problem
The client was a primary North American railway provider facing multiple issues, which left both the leadership and craft personnel feeling frustrated in their ability to perform their daily tasks. Their existing software was outdated and could to be migrated over to a new backend. Additionally, there were more issues with the older system.
​
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Lack of Reliable and accurate fleet information
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No clarity in the lifecycle of a locomotive in a single application
-
Incomplete inventory management across applications
-
Better visualization of a shop layout and a locomotives status within that facility is needed
-
Inconsistent brand standards result in every app looking and feeling different
-
Inability to track tasks performed within a single application
The team
1 UX Researcher and Designer- Me
1 Lead UX Researcher
1 Senior Designer
​​
The timeline
An overall effort spanning two years and two releases.
​​
The problem
The client was a primary North American railway provider facing multiple issues, which left both the leadership and craft personnel feeling frustrated in their ability to perform their daily tasks. Their existing software was outdated and could to be migrated over to a new backend. Additionally, there were more issues with the older system.
​
-
Lack of Reliable and accurate fleet information
-
No clarity in the lifecycle of a locomotive in a single application
-
Incomplete inventory management across applications
-
Better visualization of a shop layout and a locomotives status within that facility is needed
-
Inconsistent brand standards result in every app looking and feeling different
-
Inability to track tasks performed within a single application
The team
1 UX Researcher and Designer- Me
1 Lead UX Researcher
1 Senior Designer
​​
The timeline
An overall effort spanning two years and two releases.
​​
The solution
The client on this project utilized a dual-track agile process, comprising Discovery and Delivery. The goal was to do all of the discovery out front (Research, Interviews, CJM’s, Low Fidelity Designs, Information Architecture, and User Testing) and get buy in from all of the key stakeholders in this case Upper management, the PO’s, and the technical architecture teams, before transitioning the work to the Delivery Process.
The delivery process would involve applying the findings from discovery to create a suite of applications that enable the streamlined management and maintenance of a locomotive fleet. The suite comprises three applications that work together, utilizing a bespoke user interface (UI) layered over an SAP backend.
The suite consists of three applications: one for Fleet Managers, one for Shop Managers, and one for craft personnel.
The Fleet Manager app enables users to track the locomotive’s health and status before it arrives, as well as plan and manage shop capacity across the entire fleet.
The Shop Supervisor app helps plan how to handle locomotives once they arrive on site, including determining what maintenance is needed, which parts need to be ordered or replaced, and prioritizing repairs.
The Craft Persons app enables users to track the work performed on a locomotive by allowing them to clock in and out on a Work Order, expense repair parts, and detail scheduled maintenance needed for that locomotive.
The problem
The client was a primary North American railway provider facing multiple issues, which left both the leadership and craft personnel feeling frustrated in their ability to perform their daily tasks. Their existing software was outdated and could not be migrated to a new backend. Additionally, there were more issues with the older system.
​
-
Lack of Reliable and accurate fleet information
-
No clarity in the lifecycle of a locomotive in a single application
-
Incomplete inventory management across applications
-
Better visualization of a shop layout and a locomotives status within that facility is needed
-
Inconsistent brand standards result in every app looking and feeling different
-
Inability to track tasks performed within a single application
The problem
The client was a primary North American railway provider facing multiple issues, which left both the leadership and craft personnel feeling frustrated in their ability to perform their daily tasks. Their existing software was outdated and could not be migrated to a new backend. Additionally, there were more issues with the older system.
​
-
Lack of Reliable and accurate fleet information
-
No clarity in the lifecycle of a locomotive in a single application
-
Incomplete inventory management across applications
-
Better visualization of a shop layout and a locomotives status within that facility is needed
-
Inconsistent brand standards result in every app looking and feeling different
-
Inability to track tasks performed within a single application
The team
1 UX Researcher and Designer- Me
1 Lead UX Researcher
1 Senior Designer​
The timeline
1 UX Researcher and Designer- Me
1 Lead UX Researcher
1 Senior Designer
​​
The solution
The client on this project utilized a dual-track agile process, comprising Discovery and Delivery. The goal was to do all of the discovery out front (Research, Interviews, CJM’s, Low Fidelity Designs, Information Architecture, and User Testing) and get buy in from all of the key stakeholders in this case Upper management, the PO’s, and the technical architecture teams, before transitioning the work to the Delivery Process.
The delivery process would involve applying the findings from discovery to create a suite of applications that enable the streamlined management and maintenance of a locomotive fleet. The suite comprises three applications that work together, utilizing a bespoke user interface (UI) layered over an SAP backend.
The suite consists of three applications: one for Fleet Managers, one for Shop Managers, and one for craft personnel.
The Fleet Manager app enables users to track the locomotive’s health and status before it arrives, as well as plan and manage shop capacity across the entire fleet.
The Shop Supervisor app helps plan how to handle locomotives once they arrive on site, including determining what maintenance is needed, which parts need to be ordered or replaced, and prioritizing repairs.
The Craft Persons app enables users to track the work performed on a locomotive by allowing them to clock in and out on a Work Order, expense repair parts, and detail scheduled maintenance needed for that locomotive.
My role- Discovery
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Working with Product Owners, Shop supervisors, mechanical and locomotive engineers to understand their workflows and identify their pain points.
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Creating research-led artifacts, such as customer journey maps and user Personas, that provided deep insights and shaped the direction of product flows.
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Presenting findings and insights to the PMO team
My role- Delivery
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Incorporating the findings and insights, and brainstorming a solution that gets buy-in from various stakeholders
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Creating an interface for the fleet management and working on a specific feature, towing.
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Working as a Change Agent and training users in-person on prior interfaces built and deployed on earlier releases
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Creating Quick Reference Guides (QRG) documents to troubleshoot common application problems, to ensure minimal disruptions with new application adoption
The process
Interviews
Interviewing users and understanding their workflow. Narrowing down their pain points and taking in their feedback.
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Personas
Understanding the users and their pain points, and creating detailed personas. The personas contain critical information that provides context about the user profile, roles and responsibilities, and the types 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 participated in several interviews with product owners and their 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.
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.​
04
Personas are helpful in providing context and understanding the users better, and what applications are crucial for their functions ​
05
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.