Project

Worker Tracker
‍‍‍‍GE + Third Party Client

My Role:
UX Director
User Interface Design
Visual Designer
Icon Designer
User Research

GE partnered with a third party client to do research on creating a user persona and a journey map to better understand the use of their Worker Tracking List and deliver a digitized version for better accountability and visibility of workers and vendors. This in turn improves safety for all workers at factories who use the Worker Tracking List.

The main problem we were trying to solve is how do we improve safety for the workers at various factories with a digitized solution? Safety was our main concern and driving force for this entire project. This third party company used paper based Tracking lists when assigning workers or vendors to a particular machine to fix or maintain. This allowed for various human errors in tracking and sometimes placed workers lives at risk because the worker tracking oists were not filled in correctly or they were not understandable at all.

During our workouts, we learned a lot of pain points our main persona, the Maintenance Manager, has to go through on a daily basis. The stress level goes up 10x when their is a serious emergency at the plant, and that was something we wanted to help with. For example:

  • During an outage at the plant, Operation leads use a piece of paper called the Worker Tracking List to track who will be working on a machine.
  • Worker tracking Lists information sometimes is very hard to read due to sloppy handwriting, wrong fields being filled out, large signatures and overall messy system.
  • Physically, the WTL's get lost, damaged, ripped up, get wet, have runny ink on them and sometimes not easily accesible.
  • When a WTL is not properly filled out, it's a huge safety issue. People could lose their lives due to improper use of the document.

It was abundantly clear they needed a completely better solution for the safety of their workers and the accountability of the work performed. We were on a mission to help save lives ;-)

Now that we understood to a better degree the problem we were trying to solve, our awesome interaction Designer, Izhar Buendia and I started to develop the Persona, Journey map and a storyboard.This helped our client clearly see who and why we needed a digitized solution for them.

We now started developing some initial sketches and some really basic wire-frames for the project.

I started to create some screens from these wireframes. I collaborated with him to expand the experience a bit more using Apples Design Guidelines and using the colors we had for our own IoT brand colors, Predix. This helped the whole team and our client really see what this experience could be.

We noticed however we needed to simplify the experience and make it easier for folks to login, find their names and just sign. There was no need for calling, commenting or emailing anybody within the app. It had to be a simple 1,2,3 step experience given the sometimes stressful situations the workers could be facing.

We did two pilot tests with the workers at the plant and we were thrilled to see how they used it, how simple it was for them to fill out there information and how important it was for this to be perfect for the workers. Being in the plant itself was an eye opening experience as these workers really put their lives on the line in order for us to turn on a simple light switch.

We also did a nice video recapping our visit to the plant. It was a fantastic experience being able to create something digitally that can save lives and have a huge impact on our client.

Results

The product is being used today by our client and it was a huge win for our team.

Boris is one of , if not the most , talented designer I have come across in my career. What sets Boris apart from his amazing design skills is his unique ability to communicate and articulate his creative vision with senior leadership. He has a keen sense of problem solving for end users. An extremely high say/do ratio and his work speaks for itself. His personality and ability to work with a diverse set of team members is what makes him a highly sought after designer.
- David Spangler
VP - IT Mergers , Acquisitions & Divestitures at GE