Problem Space
Field Study
Synthesis
Business Analysis
UX Analysis
Shop managers have difficulty connecting technicians with tractors.
We conducted a fly-on-the-wall study with a large farm's equipment repair shop. Upon diagramming the shop's workflows, we identified friction points between traditional pen-and-paper and digital systems. Shop Managers had implemented new tools to improve efficiency; however, employees were confronted with new challenges.
A process map of JG Boswell's shop operations.
JG Boswell's job and data management system.
Solution Space
Vision
IA
Exploration
Prototype
Connect repair shops to their equipment and streamline their workflows.
A smart fleet of tractors IoT-enabled, connected to a web app, designed for everyone in the shop to use with ease. By removing the barriers in data and communication, it helps the Shop Manager focus on reducing tractor downtime and boost their operations.
Connect Shop Manager with tractors using IoT technology.
While we had a clear vision on the solution over the first three opportunities, we were unclear on one: "Make it easy for Shop Managers to make operational improvements". This is where I brought in UX exercises to bring the executive team to collaborate towards a solution.
I gained team alignment to ideate over this prompt: "How might we help Shop Managers make operational improvements through TractorCloud's IoT data?"
With this prompt, I facilitated a low-fidelity design session with everyone who participated in the site visit.
As expected, this produced a variety of solutions I would not have come up on my own. This collaborative design process greatly informed the functionality of our dashboard features.
Crazy 8s based on the How Might We questions.
Evaluation
User Testing
Business Impact
Customers found the app useful and explained why certain visualizations are more valuable.
We conducted think-aloud user tests to reveal that participants were able to complete the core tasks without guidance, and found the app to be overall intuitive to use.
Beyond basic usability testing, we gathered feedback over the dashboard feature and its data visualizations. Through the dashboard we interviewed for scenarios where they would use this data, and documented them to be used as user scenarios in our next design iteration.
The biggest takeaway out of this user test was that all participants emphasized how useful it would be to visualize data based on tractor tasks (such as tillage, planting, spraying, harvesting, etc). The strong signals indicates that it's worthy of further investigation in business and technical feasibility.
