DESIGNING FOR THE PLANT FLOOR WORKERS
Generative Research & Product Design
Business Need
Our team was tasked to take a human-centered approach to:
- Discover the problems Ford’s plant floor workers were facing.
- Design solutions for the identified problems to boost the vehicle production quality and speed.
Our UX Goals & Challenges
Based on the preliminary insights we gathered, we established our UX Goals:
- Identify and mitigate the challenges faced by the factory workers and their supervisors.
- Make their voices heard and help other teams discover opportunities to address plant floor workers’ unmet needs.
- Empower the workers to help boost vehicle production quality and speed.
- Make their work enjoyable and rewarding.
We were a new team, assigned to evangelize HCD thinking in an otherwise engineering-driven manufacturing division at Ford, while facing resistance from change-averse business and development heads.
Research spanned over 1 year
6 Ford manufacturing plants visited
40+ users interviewed
10 features, 25+ screens designed
HCD Supervisor(my manager)
Project Lead | Researcher | UX Strategy (me)
1 UX Designer
1 Visual Designer
Lead Research & Product Design
Deriving key insights
Designing product features
Delegating with IT and Business teams
Stakeholders pitches
Research
Over the course of a year, we visited 6 Ford manufacturing plants across the US to understand the lives of factory floor workers and their supervisors.
I devised the following key research objectives to explore:
- Which hardware and software do workers depend on for assembling vehicles?
- What information do they need to do the job
- How is the crucial information and urgent issues notified to them?
- Is there a lack of agency that is hampering their efficiency or confidence in their work?
- What are the emotional and cognitive highs and lows during their workday?
Our team and I at one of the Ford plants
Discovery
We discovered insights relating to lack of - mobility, information access, awareness of urgent issues, and prioritization of issues, that were impeding workers and their supervisors from functioning with confidence and efficiency.
Our findings, considered paradigm-shifting by the broader MTD group, helped paved way to designing many solutions addressing the discovered problems.
Walking down the Production Line.
My contribution was instrumental in discovering the challenges faced by Supervisors, who manage the plant floor workers, and we later learned that they were facing severe burnout caused by the workload and other stressors.
Research methods I used:
-Contextual Inquiries
-Focus groups
-Co-design workshops
-Affinity mapping
-Usability studies
Ensuring the production line starts without any quality or supply issues
Substitute missing staff on the production line before the shift starts
Lack of awareness of urgent and ongoing issues
Time lost in navigating unintuitive and disconnected software for getting critical information
Solely responsible for managing 50+ workers they don’t personally know
Constantly juggling multiple responsibilities of delegating, managing, QC, and reporting.
Solutions
Although our insights led to multiple solutions initiated by our team or other groups within the org, I particularly led the efforts to solve the problems faced by Supervisors.
I designed a Companion app that brings the most crucial information and agency Supervisors need at their fingertips.
• Enhances agency and information access
• Proactively alerts them of the most pressing issues
• Awareness of their line workers and their problems
Designing the Companion App
- I designed 7 unique product features, incorporating them into the mobile app to address the key user needs we determined.
- Conducted workshops and multiple usability reviews with the target users to ensure the design is meeting our goals
- Conducted stakeholder alignment workshops with other teams who would provide us the data and infrastructure needed for the app, and also with the development team in charge of building the app.
- This led to several design revisions needed to accommodate both infrastructure-centric and political constraints, as building this product required looking at information and interactions in a way the Manufacturing organization had not looked before.
Design Principles
I devised the following design principles to help guide our design while staying true to the user needs.
• Cannot be a chore, or come in the way of doing their work
• Error-free and NO false positives
• Easy to use with gloves on
• Minimal learning curve
An early prototype mockup
My Role as the Project Lead - Design
UX Lead (me)
-Lead a team of a UX Designer and a Visual Designer to expand the design concepts into a complete app design
-Drive the UX Vision for the app
-Help the team empathize with user needs and constraints
-Help them understand the design and UX requirements for the app
-Provide them feedback and assistance where needed
My Role as the Project Lead - Development
-Talking to SMEs to understand the existing infrastructure
-Delegating negotiations with other teams for lending us the infrastructure needed to build our mobile app
-Handing off finalized design features and screens to developers in agile sprints
-Helping them understand the design and translate it into code
-Finding workarounds for features that may not be developed due to infrastructure or other constraints
Reflection
Launching new solutions in a large organization with established practices and limited infrastructure is challenging. Even more so when you are battling age-old practices and belief systems held by the teams you work or compete with. It requires conducting mutually beneficial negotiations with other teams, a thorough understanding of the underlying technologies and infrastructures, constant pivots, the ability to handle multiple changes to the intended design, etc.
This project also presented me an opportunity to officially lead a team of designers, and be an effective leader of the vision, delegator of the tasks, and a guide to the team when needed.
