Contextual support tool for electricians and electrical engineers that utilizes augmented reality and conversational UI.
A huge part of the company's customer experience is that of troubleshooting switchgear when power goes out. Electricians, facility managers, field service engineers, and more face these challenges daily. Through improving communication and collaboration, our goal is to enhance safety, reliability, efficiency, and the human experience of power management system.
I worked with 4 other designers on my capstone project team to conduct research and design solutions for this project: Pierre Amelot, Gyuri Han, Arnita Saini, and Neeraj Talukdar. Our client included experts from a global power management company.
Project Manager, Designer
Jan - Aug 2017
UNDERSTANDING
The first few months we spent focusing on primary and secondary research into the domain of power management to understand the different people involved, their needs and tasks, and the switchgear they work with.
Switchgear are like fuse boxes, but for large buildings and complexes such as hospitals and universities. They are devices used to protect and control electrical equipment.
Switchgear can contain many components including circuit breakers, fuses, and protective relays. Within a certain distance from switchgear, there can be risk of an arc flash, a type of electrical explosion.
We explored a broad range of topics, including emerging technologies, analagous domains, and competitors. We also conducted 17 stakeholder interviews, including field visits and contextual inquiry.
From our 17 interviews, we organized over 700 affinity notes to discover themes and patterns. We then conducted a walk-the-wall exercise with our client to share and discuss findings and inspire new ideas and visions.
A huge part of our client's customer experience is that of troubleshooting switchgear when power goes out. Through our research, we discovered the many challenges, costs, and risks that exist with this process.
To tackle the various pain points we discovered through our research, we brainstormed many different ideas, many of which utilized emerging technologies such as augmented reality and conversational design to provide information more efficiently and in context.
From 29 different sketches and ideas, we eventually narrowed down to 11 concepts to evaluate with users, advisors, and peers.
These 11 concepts were presented as storyboards to different users, including customers, field service engineers, and remote support teams. Users provided their reactions, what they could see being useful or not, and eventually we narrowed down to 4 concepts to further refine.
I focused on prototyping the interactive 3D manual concept, including creating low to mid-fidelity designs, creating an interactive prototype with InVision, and collaborating with teammates on implementation.
Interactive prototypes were built for the 4 selected concepts. We then conducted user testsing to elicit reactions from users and further refine the final vision.
We envision a system called Lumière that facilitates efficient diagnosis and troubleshooting of switchgear among electricians and engineers via an integrated set of knowledge sharing and decision-making tools for quick access to key contextual information about switchgear.
