Optimizing Mobile Experience in Asset Productivity
UX design isn’t a linear process. To make great products, you need to make lots of changes and test them. The key is to define assumptions, test them, refine, and repeat.
As a business, we constantly challenge ourselves to provide the most innovative solutions to our clients. There are changes and updates to the project to provide the most suitable solutions, and it is first mirrored through the User Interface (UI). We test, discuss and iterate new changes, and it goes constantly on and on to achieve a great User Experience (UX). A good UI/UX might allow users to be able to navigate the program, but a better one will allow users to make use of the full potential of the overall project.
In ZebraX, we develop an Asset Productivity Dashboard. The Asset-Intensive Industries — such as chemicals, oil and gas, mining, metals, pulp and paper, and power production — have been turning into new technologies to increase the reliability and availability of their equipment. The technology helps each company to keep maintenance costs under control, where users can track the asset activity, location and history. It is a real-time single source of truth of asset productivity, fast and easy to convey information to the whole organization.
Having real-time insight in terms of asset operations helps to monitor the business, define areas for improvement, and conduct accurate decision making. And as we completed the Asset Productivity Dashboard to help the companies, we tested and iterated the design once again, and we decided to work through it on a different screen, the mobile.
Creating the mobile screen at the end of our design process is challenging. Occasionally, the design is made mobile-first rather than desktop-first, because it is a small screen that only can contain so little information. Mobile-First design helps the design process to focus on the most important content first in a hold of the hand. It is a design strategy to sketch, prototype and work on your way into the smallest screen then way up to the largest. This strategy helps to create a consistent user experience across all devices.
As “Desktop First” is not a common practice, we’re up for a challenge to create the mobile at the end of our design process. It is designed considering the asset tracking process that not only happens in the room, but also on the site.
Creating Mobile Asset Productivity
Content First
As experts say, desktop to mobile is a “Graceful Degradation” but we make it happen
We built a desktop version with well-rounded features but then needed to cut some of the features. We need to prioritize the features, knowing the information architecture of the project is the key. Which content is the most important to this project? To work on the smallest screen means to focus on the most important metrics and focus on it.
In this project, the main metrics are the activity of the asset, where we can see the asset is either on and working, on but idle, or off. This metric affects fuel consumption, staffing decisions, maintenance scheduling, and rental costs. Understanding exactly how an asset is being used is the first step to controlling costs. Making the design fit the hold of the hand is challenging but as we know the main metrics, we managed to fit them in.
Simplicity and Straightforward
As we understand that activity is the priority, we created the page around it. The main focus of the mobile page is a donut chart, where we could see the largest or the smallest percentage of the activity. Users can easily translate which activity is the largest and define areas for improvement of the current asset.
User Friendliness
The mobile version does not need complicated features or components that are hard to navigate. As we put the main content which is on the first page, we created a simple tab on top of it for the users to navigate between the dashboard and the asset location tracking. Users can see the asset location on the map and also go to the asset details as we create a details button on the map.
UX design isn’t a linear process. To make great products, you need to make lots of changes and test them. The key is to define assumptions, test them, refine them, and repeat them. We test and refine our Asset Productivity Dashboard to provide the most effective solutions to the users. We hope to deliver excellent information through Mobile Asset Productivity Dashboard and successfully communicate the data to help monitor the business.
Changes are inevitable, and we’re up for the challenge.
