Drone Piloting
In the dangerous profession of underground mining a poor user experience is more than just distracting; it's a safety hazard.
Discovery
As the company’s first user experience professional, I had to start by gathering a complete picture of the users for whom we were designing.
Our primary user group were underground mining surveyors who performed the risky task of measuring and evaluating hazards in new areas of their mine.
We understood what surveyors did on a high level but we needed more context. Feature requests, surveys, heuristic analysis, customer calls, and a relationship with our customer-facing associates had helped gain only a partial picture.
The full picture became clear on my first site visit. I could see the users’ points of frustration, wear the protective equipment they wore, and feel the stress that the physical environment placed on the body.
Depending on the location in the mine, sound could but anywhere from a constant 80-150 decibels. Relying on sound in our UX was impractical.
Temperatures where surveyors worked were 85 degrees Fahrenheit if they were fortunate enough to get a cooler area of the mine. Heat was compounded by the higher humidity levels. Surveyors often had to choose between wearing safety equipment and being tolerably uncomfortable.
The mine also reminded us of the ever present threat of cave-ins with occasional loud booms from overhead. Including the countless other environmental threats in the workplace, there was a tacit urgency in any task the surveyors performed.
It became clear how important it was to give these folks a product that was quick and simple to use.
Analysis
With qualitative and quantitative data such as visual media, the System Usability Score, VCAP cognitive workload metrics, and other survey results, I was able to provide reports to those who had never seen our UX in person.
My user journey documented the user’s typical flow through the software. This became my foundation for designing the new information architecture. Through this, I could see the users' essential interactions with the software through phases, and we could now declutter the UX according to each phase of the user's journey.
Initial State of the Software
The previous version was cluttered. The company's design philosophy was to make every feature and piece of information one click away for the user. As my discovery work showed, the issue was not clicks but unfamiliar icons, terminology, and feature placement. Consequently users needed reminders of where everything was. Users were often going into their settings to declutter the screen for each phase of their work.
Reorganizing the Architecture
Following the evidence from my site visits, I designed "modes" based on the user's goals to automate the decluttering process.
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I kept in mind that our users were only accessing our software a couple times a week, so user memory was not likely to overcome usability issues. Features had to be labeled, icons had to be commonplace, and terminology had to be familiar.
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I performed an icon audit for UX conventions, aligned our UI to brand colors, and enlarged our UI to fit the handheld platform. I limited the use of color in the UI to communicate critical information, adding form where it would not detract from function.
Redesigns
​Keeping in mind the ways I saw our users hold and interact with our tablets, I designed the UI to be comfortable and legible for new users or those under duress.
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Some of this work meant redesigning icons to be more representative of the results users expected. Other work required reorganizing frequent and infrequent features, as well as features that were only for internal use.
The resulting UI was one that was less demanding on Fitz’s Law principles, meaning the user did not have to look around the screen or move their hand far to access features and information. The adherence to brand colors and guidelines also helped give the UI a more cohesive and polished appearance that would further legitimize our solution to customers.
