My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
I’ve worked on a lot of applications for doing work in the field, be that an oil refinery, an aircraft hanger, an auto dealership, or a mine field. One capability that most customers want is note taking. This sounds like a simple, even blasé request, but it’s really quite interesting how many differences there are in the details of the various implementations.
Some clients see notes as valuable content that increases the knowledge base of their workforce. They trust their technicians to make intelligent decisions based on circumstances and experience, rather than blindly following procedures. With this perspective, they expect notes to be shared—globally available and searchable. They may even request a system by which technicians’ notes can be approved for inclusion in revisions of the official documentation.
Other customers see notes as a liability. It is un-vetted information that they can’t control. A technician may make the wrong decision based on somebody’s suggestion that results in expensive equipment damage, injuries, or loss of life. In such cases, functionality is limited. Notes are for personal use only and can’t be seen by anyone else. The feature may be permission-based or made available only in a training mode. The whole feature may be enabled and disabled as an administrative preference setting.
Those are two extremes, of course, so there’s plenty of room in the middle, and many other choices. May notes be printed or exported? Should they display inline or in a separate window? Can they be edited, under what conditions, and by whom? Is there a size limit? What happens when the content a note refers to is updated or deleted?
When it comes to application design for industry, even a feature as unassuming as notes can be a challenging design problem.
I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like best about my job is that I’m often learning about new domains. I spent the past two days at the Norfolk Naval Base. Tuesday found me aboard the Dwight D. Eisenhower, an aircraft carrier. That is one big boat. I had the opportunity to tour the flight deck and the tower, but spent most of the day in the bowels of the ship. I can’t discuss the details of the work I was doing, of course, but suffice it to say that it was very educational. The benefits of observing the users of your software doing their work in their environment should never be underestimated.
On Wednesday, I visited the New Mexico, a submarine. In both ships, but especially the sub, space is at a premium, and every bit of it is utilized. Most of the rooms and hallways are lined with piping, cables, conduits, and ductwork. You’ll see gauges, valves, and equipment panels every time you turn around, even in the “public” areas. The experience gave me a new appreciation for the hardships that our sailors endure to protect our country. Everyone that I met was very polite and gracious with their time, even though I was interrupting their work, getting in their way, and usually slowing them down (Climbing ladders in a sub takes a little bit of practice). I have a lot of respect for these men and women, and I’ll do my best to make their jobs a little easier.
In the past, collaboration was limited to collocated activities and voice communication via telephone or radio. The introduction of mobile computers has opened up numerous possibilities for remote collaboration.
When multiple mobile devices are connected via a wireless network supported by a server, participating technicians can share information and maintain awareness of overall status. I’ve designed software that helps Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) units track step-by-step procedure progress, as well as equipment status, and allows warfighters utilizing GPS to pinpoint each team member on a map of the area. Furthermore, team members are able to record locations of explosive devices and other hazards, information that is immediately shared with the rest of the team. The system included a “media board” where recorded audio and digital photographs could also be shared with all participants within seconds.
When using a printed manual, there is no easy way to report errors found in the field back to the authors, and updates are costly and infrequent. Whether through workflow integration, or a simpler, message-based approach, a well-designed system makes it quick and easy for a technician to enter a discrepancy report, automatically including the current context. When properly integrated with authoring tools and an update mechanism, the system supports an entire technical information lifecycle that keeps a technician’s resources up-to-date.
A major automobile manufacturer, for example, must ship a box of CDs to every dealership each month to update their technical manuals. That means that somebody at each dealership must sit down and feed those CDs into a computer one at a time to update the software. Thousands of man hours could be saved by an incremental, automated update system, not to mention the production and shipping costs.
An average day for a mobile field worker will find him in any number of conditions, including extreme temperature changes, indoor and outdoor locations, low lighting, loud noise, tight quarters, roofs, and crawlspaces. They must climb ladders, negotiate catwalks, and navigate potentially hazardous areas tracing electrical lines and gathering data. They get their hands dirty with grease and particulate matter. The mobile computer that accompanies technicians must be able to withstand these conditions, as well as being bumped and dropped, and survive dirty fingers.
There are also locations in which electronic devices can cause explosions. Certain areas within oil rigs and refineries are examples of such, where flammable gasses and vapors are a concern. Equipment intended for use in potentially explosive atmospheres must meet intrinsic safety standards.
Furthermore, the field workers must dress for the environment. They may be wearing eye protection, ear protection, or heavy gloves. They may be carrying a lot of bulky, heavy equipment around with them. These are all important factors that play into the overall context that must be taken into account when designing a solution. They can have significant impact on the choice of hardware and the design of the software.
The dynamic nature of digital information provides many opportunities for improved performance. These improvements affect work performed in traditional office environments, but are fully realized when applied to fieldwork.
Power system engineers require a lot of detailed information about the electrical system of an industrial facility before they can model and analyze it. A technician takes large forms that represent common couplings of electrical components to record information about breakers, panels, substations, and the like. The problem is that the electrical systems they are recording often deviate from the structures represented on the forms. To compensate, the technician draws extra boxes and records a lot of information in the margins. Digital forms can adapt to match the information that must be recorded. Dependent upon entered information, other fields can be displayed or hidden, presenting the user with only the fields that need to be filled.
Given a specific context, a smart system can predict, to some extent, a user’s intent. Auto-completion shortens the amount of time spent entering data by offering the most likely options as quick selections. The system can also enforce valid data input. Certain fields should only contain numbers, or numbers within a specific range, or a specific number of characters. Some fields are required, while others are optional. As the user records information, the system can check entered values to ensure that they match expectations. When they don’t, or when required values are missing, the user can be alerted. This significantly decreases errors, ensuring that mistakes are corrected, keeping problems from occurring downstream.
Power system engineers require a lot of detailed information about the electrical system of an industrial facility before they can model and analyze it. A technician takes large (tabloid size) forms that represent common couplings of electrical components to record information about breakers, panels, substations, and the like. The problem is that the electrical systems they are recording often deviate from the structures represented on the forms. To compensate, the technician draws extra boxes and records a lot of information in the margins. Digital forms can adapt to match the information that must be recorded. Dependent upon entered information, other fields can be displayed or hidden, presenting the user with only the fields that need to be filled.
Until the adoption of mobile devices, all data entry is a two-step process. The technician in the field records data on the paper form, which is later typed into a computer. This introduces many opportunities for errors. Replicating data is not an entertaining task, and it is all too easy to mistype a value. In some cases, the person copying the data is not the person that originally recorded it, and may not be able to read the handwriting. This problem is exacerbated by the rigidity of printed forms, as previously mentioned. The technicians suffer from another deficiency of this process: after recording the data, they ship it back to the engineers that model and analyze the system. Then they move on to the next site, possibly in a different part of the country. In the mean time, the engineers often find that data is incomplete or unclear, requiring that a technician return to the site. This inefficiency incurs a lot of extra time and cost. If the data were to be recorded in software on-site, validation could make sure that all of the required data is present, and anomalies are explained.
By its very nature, a mobile computer must withstand a lot of physical abuse. At the same time, it must not become a hazard itself.
An average day for a power systems technician will find him in any number of conditions, including extreme temperature changes, indoor and outdoor locations, low lighting, loud noise, tight quarters, roofs, and crawlspaces. They must climb ladders, negotiate catwalks, and navigate potentially hazardous areas tracing electrical lines and gathering data. They get their hands dirty with grease and particulate matter. The mobile computer that accompanies technicians must be able to withstand these conditions, as well as being bumped and dropped, and survive dirty fingers.
There are also locations in which electronic devices can cause explosions. Certain areas within oil rigs and refineries are examples of such, where flammable gasses and vapors are a concern. Equipment intended for use in potentially explosive atmospheres must meet intrinsic safety standards.
Oil drilling platform technicians relate a tale common to maintenance in most industries. Rather than making a trip to the control room to grab a job card and document the work they just completed, they’ll continue to the next task, making a mental note to fill one out at the end of their shift. They’ll usually remember to do so, but even when it’s not completely forgotten, how accurate is the report hours later? Given a mobile computer, a technician can fill out a digital job card on the spot while the work is fresh in his mind and the equipment is present for reference. Much of the information may have already been populated from data entered during the maintenance procedure. As a result, important information is recorded in a timely manner with more detail and less errors.
