Our team was asked to help Viu Digital provide their services more efficiently by finding areas of improvement through the use of technology, gather quality data so management can discover root causes of issues and improve operations and ensure safety of work to protect employees and remain competitive within the industry.
We defined a solution that would connect employees to an app and receive work orders and instructions, mark completions, perform audits and much more. Managers would be able to track inventory, schedule employees for their shifts according to training requirements, seniority and availability, and perform other workforce management.
I conducted observational sessions and interviewed stakeholders at Viu Digital and employees and managers on four different automotive plants to understand how different roles and shifts operate daily. Using the insights from our research, I mapped a comprehensive workflow that included job creation and work plans, scheduling and resourcing staff and day-to-day operations of maintenance and cleaning workers on plants.
I collaborated with our product strategist to synthesize our discovery data. We identified three major areas of inefficiencies: 1. Scheduling shifts and employees by supervisors and management 2. Following work instructions 3. Conducting layered audit. We also uncovered technical and situational challenges like noisy environments, No free-hands, and limited cellular range on factory floors.
In partnership with our product strategist, I facilitated collaborative design workshops with our client where we sketched ideas for an improved service and aligned on a strategy to develop a platform solution for employees and system managers.
After aligning with our client on our platform strategy, we held an internal collaborative sketching session where we ideated solutions for a desktop and mobile app. Once we had team alignment on highlevel interaction models, I created userflows for both the staff mobile app and the executive desktop application and created wireframes and clickable prototypes that I used for user testing with supervisors and managers as well as staff on the plant floor. I iterated the wireframes based on what we learned from user testing sessions and prepared the final deck and presented our discovery findings and solutions to our client. Finally, our team worked with the Viu Digital stakeholders to estimate and plan the product release.
I tested the early wireframe concepts to ensure that the data we are presenting to managers to help them schedule shifts and assign jobs will help them do their jobs more efficiently. I learned what stats were useful on a week level vs. shift level. I also learned what default calendar view is more useful to users and what statuses were important to highlight in terms of job progress.
Below are examples of the information architecture diagrams, userflows and wireframes I created for this project and used for user testing.
Supervisors, planners, and management wasted hours scheduling and searching for and manually documenting information about job completion. Our solution included one source of data for all scheduling needs including job, training and staff data, system recommendations on when to schedule jobs and to whom, ability to change job assignments on the spot, log scheduling data for management to analyze and training data for each employee with prompts to renew training.
Work instructions were outdated and hard to understand/read. Our solution simplified task management with digital work instruction builder, step-by-step instructions with media with offline capacity, easy updates to work instructions within the system, and history of staff with training data for specific work instructions.
Audits of the completed jobs were not always conducted to the desired degree, which affected quality and put related future tasks at risk of delay. Our solution allowed self and layered audits conducted within the system with offline capacity, audit information for management to track job completion and make changes in real time if needed.
