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Justice for Personas

TL;DR

Midway through 2023, we uncovered a critical gap in our product: while our tablet app successfully captured field data and synced it to the web, users had no way to view, analyze, or edit this data. This oversight jeopardized mining operations, where safety and productivity rely on dynamic planning and quality control. To tackle this, we conducted 15 discovery sessions with 12 research participants across Australia and North America. 

Insights revealed that 80% of users preferred a list view for managing blast files, requested color-coordinated hole layouts, and needed discrepancies between design and actual data to be visually highlighted. These findings directly informed my design tailored to meet users' critical needs for managing and analyzing field data.


Goal

If you’ve ever worked on a growing team, that has multiple competing priorities and lots of new features on the roadmap, you’ll understand the struggle to keep your product’s experience consistent across different parts of it. This was the spot in which our product team found itself midway through 2023: We’ve had successfully built the web application that was continuously improving and gaining traction among users AND we’ve had just released the companion tablet app to be used on the go, however we had a gap in the experience we forgot to account for; How do we store the field data and how do we display it to the web user?

Impact

Objective of this workshop was to get the product, design and support teams on the same page before diving into user research. I invited 6 members from these teams to a 2 hour long workshop.



Approach


Prototyping as part of discovery
At the time of this feature’s discovery phase I was reading Marty Cagan’s Inspired, which extensively describes the benefits of using prototypes over statis lo-fi designs for discovery. This inspired me to create quick mockups and prototypes of the concept of blast actuals. For the parts of completely unknown user needs I resorted to showing empty interactive screens to let the user tell us what they want to see.  



...I had been going about this all wrong – users don’t think of blast actuals as a separate concept from the lifecycle of a blast, therefore they expect the most recent data to be present by default!


Reflection

  • Number of tests
  • Common feedback
  • Challenges
  • major findings

📌 Max diff tool