Optimizing Vehicle Manufacturing Operations
Generative Research & Product Design
Key Accomplishments
- Reducing communication delays on the plant floor by 30%.
- Enabling supervisors with critical and time-sensitive information.
- Automating arduous and redundant reporting
- Digitizing People management and reporting of Quality issues
Problem Space
Boost the vehicle production quality and speed by:
- Discovering problems faced by Ford’s plant floor workers.
- Designing solutions for the identified problems.
Project Timeline
Boost the vehicle production quality and speed by:
- Discovering problems faced by Ford’s plant floor workers.
- Designing solutions for the identified problems.
- Lead research & product design
- Deriving key insights
- Designing product features
- Stakeholder alignment
- Tech. feasability evaluation
- Agile UX iterations & Dev-handoff
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 designed
- 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
- Stakeholder alignment
- Tech. feasability evaluation
- Agile UX iterations & Dev-handoff
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 pave the 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 and accelerates plant-floor issue resolution.
Key Features:
• Enhances agency and information access
• Proactively alerts them of the most pressing issues
• Awareness of their line workers and their problems
