HF Compass

KEYWORDS: UX DESIGN, QUALITATIVE UX RESEARCH, PROTOTYPING, UI DESIGN, INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, USER FLOW, INTERACTION DESIGN

In February 2022, again, I was selected as solver in the UX Challenge in Trento. This time around, I, together with my team-mates,  worked on a problem introduced to us by Marangoni Machinery which is a brand of Marangoni Meccanica S.p.A., a large company based in Rovereto, Italy, operating in the design and construction of industrial plants for the manufacturing of tires. The problem they presented to us was about designing a system used by managers and technical staff which supports reporting and managing of non-conformities. Non-conformities are essentially problems that could impact the flow of operations in any way (could be electrical, mechanical, logistical etc..).
To approach this challenge, we went through a Reverse Design Sprint which means that we started with mapping the problem, then conducted semi-structured interviews to understand the user needs, and in the end we ideated multiple solutions and prototyped the best ones.
During each phase of the sprint, we had meetings with the company to report the progress of the project, discuss the research results and design decisions, and receive their feedback in order to align users' needs with business requirements.
In the following sections of this report, I will go in-depth about each phase of the sprint: you will know about all the problems we faced and how we solved them.
I also want to highlight that I participated and gave my contribution in every phase of the sprint, and specifically in the interviewing and prototyping phases.

Day One / Mapping the problem

First of all, In accordance with Marangoni, ever since the first meeting that we had with them, we focused our efforts on solving the problems for the managers and not the technical staff. This was due to the fact that, for the technical staff, the company had a Voice User Interface in mind; in that moment, designing a VUI would have meant that we would have had to solve two separate problems for two different sets of users, and was therefore impossible given the short amount of time that we had at our disposal for the challenge (just for four days). So, in accordante with them, we went for the managers as users for our system. 

After this initial decision, we specifically focused the Quality Manager and the Technical Managers. Starting from this, the idea was to design a tool that would help solve the problem of handling and managing the large number of non-conformities that they had to process - a non-compliance management tool. 

In order to kickstart the project, we focused our efforts in discovering the user journey and tried to pinpoint the smaller issues that make up the bigger problem. We used How Might We’s to identify situations that might need improvements. After consolidating these HMWs, we ended the first day of the challenge with these general ideas that, in our opinion, needed some work

• Tracking history
• General picture of the orders
• Filtering/tagging/labelling the proposals
• Adding other managers to check a proposal / Assigning activities to people
• General communication activities
• Confirming, rejecting, editing proposals
• Other small issues
  
  Here is the final output of the categorisation, after the dot voting which allowed us to identify the most relevant topics to deal with during the week:

Then, in order to better frame the problem and the working procedure of the “order system” that Marangoni requires, we reflected on a hypothetical user journey starting from an initial flow that the company showed us. Here it is:

 At this point, we started to imagine a dashboard as a possible solution to many of these issues but, because this was only our impression, we had to carry out user research to verify whether this was actually needed by the users or not.

Day Two / User research

On the second day of the Challenge, we started from the areas we had pinpointed during the HMWs phase, and we designed an interview protocol with specific questions that were supposed to help us dig deeper in the problem from the users’ perspective. Ultimately, the aim of the interviews was to grasp a better picture of the managers’ needs, goals and experiences in their day-to-day work.

The managers that the company arranged for us to interview were 1 Quality Manager and 3 Technical Managers of different areas (Electrical Supervisor, Mechanical Manager, Head of Electric design) and therefore we tailored our questions to their roles.
Then, we conducted the interviews in a semi-structured format. In this way, we could also be more flexible in asking questions, and we could also gather more insights wherever we had the chance to follow up with more questions.
Lastly, we gathered  and arranged all the findings of the interviews in the table below (names of the participants are blurred for privacy):

After this, we faced a phase of consolidation of the results and we went for a thematic analysis which allowed us to give codes to different topics that emerged during the interviews; next, the entire team reviewed them to find the common attributes and organise them into categories with different themes and then, tried to discover patterns and regularities. The result of this analysis enabled us to come up with two main outcomes:

• Two proto-personas representing “Quality Manager” and “Technical Managers”
• Two macro themes encompassing the main micro themes on which we should put our focus in the next phases

The proto-personas and the macro themes are presented in the next images. The idea of a dashboard started to become more concrete at this point:

Then, we recapped the lessons learned from the data analysis. We extracted and mentioned evidence from the interviews referring to each area under analysis and we proposed proper actions to take correspondingly. Here is the list of problems with suggested actions:

•  For managers, it is "painful" to manually input data every time - "it is a waste of time", as literally expressed by one of the interviewees
   -> Automated dashboard which automatically fetches data in real time about proposals, without the need to inputting them again in later phases
  
  
• Too many emails arrive and it's hard to keep track of them - it'd be nice to have a visual feedback on the dashboard
  -> LATCH organisation of information (proposals can occupy a distinct section of the interface and they can be sorted by time, relevance (priority)
  
  
• Data collection should be supported with possibility to easily start statistical analysis on the data
  -> Possibility to download the excel .csv directly from the dashboard to be used later for further analysis
  
  
• Status of proposals need to be constantly and immediately visible
  -> Colours, timelines for each proposal, maybe visible through a dropdown menu. to clearly indicate the current status proposal. Ex: yellow for "in charge", timeline with the history of the issue (sort of progress bar)
  
  
• Difficulty in differentiating type and magnitude of problems from the beginning
  -> Clear and standardised language that the technicians and managers can work on (managers can edit these after they arrive). This language is visually present in the dashboard by means of tags
  
  
• Absence of a clear history section that could be useful to managers
  -> History should be inherently added in the dashboard, and should be filtered like the rest and be useful to specific people
  
  
• Coding system for the machines is not effective to enable managers to identify machines as they are communicating with technicians
  -> It refers to macro decisions taken at the managerial level and is not a problem derived from the design side, but we can provide a space on the dashboard for the machines’ codes to facilitate communication
  
  
• Difficulty in being updated in real-time
  -> Providing notification system, plus highlighting any new event in the system
  
  
• Difficulty of acknowledging the impact of each problem on the company in terms of time and money spent
  -> Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be an integral part of the interface and we should provide Data Visualisation to easily make them understandable and the managers should be able to extract insights from them instantly

After the analysis of the interviews was finished, we set up a meeting with the company with the goal of aligning the newly discovered users’ needs with the business needs. The outcome of this meeting was a new, specific list of design objectives that would be the basis for the ideation and prototyping phase.

• Lower cognitive load and time spent on processing the proposals/activities
• Reduce the business impact of mishandling non-conformities
• Provide an overview of the status of all activities and facilitate decisions
• Speed up the communication process between managers

Day three / Ideate the solution

On the third day of the challenge, we started sketching possible scenarios/interfaces which would allow us to visualise possible actions to tackle the problems we identified in the previous phases.
All the members of the team created their own sketches and then we continued with a museum phase where we spent time to review all ideas individually and write down our comments or doubts. Next, we started discussing them, one by one, clarifying the doubts and identifying chances of improvement for each of them. Then we proceeded to a voting session to express our preferences using dot voting as a form of making heat maps. We also went to a meeting with the company to acquire their opinions, preferences, and votes on the sketches and identify the ideas that could work best in aligning users' needs with the company’s needs. The most voted ideas were sketches that represented actions related to:

• Differentiation among  “proposals”, “activities” and “done”.
• Categorisation of the proposals or activities according to the type of non-conformity identified (like electrical or mechanical) by using distinctive colours and labels.
• Communication issues by giving the possibility of discussing a proposal with other managers by adding them to the proposal card.
• Facilitation of monitoring with rapid feedback on the progress of the activities and with more streamlined sorting and filtering capabilities.
• Possibility of assigning activities to technical staff directly from the list of proposals or from the proposal’s card.

Here are the most voted ideas:

Day four / Prototype

The fourth day of the challenge was completely dedicated to the design and creation of the prototype of the non-compliance management system, which was based on the most voted ideas that came out of the sketching phase. We dedicated the entire fourth day to the creation of the prototype.

>> Here is the link to the final, working prototype <<
Important disclaimer: all the data you see in the prototype is not real. The non-compliances inserted are not real and are just meant to be a mock-up of the interface.

In order to make it in one day, we had to pull an all nighter, of course! But besides that, it was worth it. I want to specifically thank and compliment my team-mates Hossein Mapar, Rita Gambardella, Shiva Saket and Andrea Lomurno. Their help was fundamental in creating a prototype that was completely made by using Figma's full power: Auto-layout, Components, Variants. With this prototype, I feel that my skills with Figma have reached a new high.

Day five / Presentation and celebration

The last day of the challenge was the day of presentations, both to Marangoni, the company, and to the jury.

You can watch our final presentation at this link (from minute 40.48 onwards, led by my super talented friend Ginevra Fedrizzi), while the moment where we were declared as winners (again!) is here.

Last thoughts and main takeaways

+  This year, I was much more comfortable from last year's challenge. I really felt the experience in me, and I
believed I was able to set up a design thinking process from the get-go.

+ This time I felt better at translating research insights into actionable solutions. This means that I was able
to articulate my design decision in an informed, research-based way with much more awareness compared to previous projects.

+  When working on a design project, it is absolutely crucial to manage to put together users' needs with business' needs.
This year, I feel I made a step up because for the first time in a design project I started thinking about the impact of my UX solution
on the overall business in terms of KPIs and actual impact on the operations of the entire business.

+  With Figma Auto-layout and components on my part, I fear no evil.

@2024, designed by myself