Improving procedures to prevent hazards
DBMS, Shape Digital
Overview
Shape Digital develops products to help industries to predict and prevent hazards. As a first product in the Oil and Gas industry, DBMS (Digital Barrier Operator) is a process safety system designed to help a FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading), plant operators to monitor, manage and maintain procedures that assure the vessel's safe
Year
2022
Goals
Find opportunities to increase DBMS’ adoption by operators and clients.
Roles
Lead Product Discovery
UX Strategy
Visual design
Implementation
Platform
Desktop
The Problem
As a recently launched product that has the goal of preventing hazards for Safety Operators on Oil and Gas ships (FPSOs) DBMS (Digital Barrier Management System) was born with the purpose of automating safety procedures. After the launch and feedback follow up stakeholders understood that there was still a part of the safety prevention journey DBMS could cover even though there wasn't much of a clarity. I was assigned to run a Product Discovery process to identify new opportunities to improve DBMS.
Secondary Research
As a first step of the process I checked the existing research on the Safety Management Journey in order to learn more about the product and start raising hypothesis. I organized my findings on a ASD matrix in order to keep track of what are the certainties, assumptions and doubts that we still had about the safety process.
I also ran an usability test combined with in in depth interviews since we did not have that documentation available at the moment and it was a fast paced environment. That research lead me to the following assumptions:
Users still don't fully use DBMS for all their needs, they claim they need to learn how to work on the system and prefer to have a safe documentation still in paper.
There are still safety procedures that are done manually and can impact on DBMS approval.
Communication accross stakeholders is still a big problem on safety procedures’ approval, it can take a considerable amount of time and it's done by e-mail.
Identified opportunity areas
After collecting all the results from the user interviews I collected all the insights and separate them in how might we questions:
How might we automate the mitigation process for highly impaired equipment?
How might we improve the findability of Work Orders?
How might we improve the link and tracking between Work Orders?
After identifying the opportunities we prioritized them based on which one had more impact to the customers and the business. The opportunity we decided to tackle was:
How might we automate the mitigation process for highly impaired equipment?
Jobs-to-be-done
After conducting more stakeholders interviews we defined this solutions profiles and Jobs-to-be-done for the employees that act on this process.
Ideation
After understanding the context of the procedure, I started mapping a flow the interactions of how the internal processes worked and if there was room for any improvement. I also started mapping
Solution Design
Case to Operate (CTO) now allows faster communication and transparency for Safety mitigation
The CTO is a pre existing process that already required improvements and was done manually. One of the major values that automating this process brings is allowing faster and transparent communication across stakeholders evolved on a hazard mitigation process. Each user profile has their assigned role and is notified (currently by e-mail but in the future also through the platform) whenever a new action is required making the process faster and more transparent.
Stakeholders can follow the status of each process and even verify actions taken on older process without having to do dig into older e-mails. The search and filter allow users to find easily older processes.
Usability Testing
The validation of the process was done by collecting feedbacks from stakeholders from each user profiles on individual meetings on which stakeholders would provide feedbacks that would be filtered and prioritized to either be added to the MVP or to the roadmap for future validation.
Learnings from the project
Dark Theme and contrast:
Even though the product was early staged and didn't focus on accessibility a lot of the screens needed to be redesign to fulfil minimum contrast levels in order to allow users navigating quicker in the platform. This was my first dark theme product and I learned a lot about working with colours and contrast to increase the navigation.
We weren't able to measure since we were still launching and it was a fast paced environment but we did collect feedbacks from stakeholders about the reorganisation of the colour scheme and components.
Continue evolving to achieve an user-centered testing approach even with constraints.
Shape Digital was an early stage startup with only 1,5 year old. A lot of the evangelising had already started but I believe we needed to start structuring access to real users. The context was hard since a lot of them did not worked in land and also there was fear from leadership of getting in the way of user's workload, but showing the value of user testing over time ir an ongoing job that needs to be done.
