Surfacing pain points
Documenting a utility company field crew’s processes, and asking critical questions
SKILL HIGHLIGHTS
Interview-driven research
Process mapping
THE CHALLENGE:
UNDERSTANDING PAIN POINTS
In 2024, our field operations team planned to change the geospatial network management software. To help facilitate this change, our Experience Design team was asked to document the field crews' current process and pain points. These findings were intended for a workshop with the vendor to inform the new system's configuration.
I paired with a UX researcher on the team to identify and document these experiences.
THE SOLUTION:
DESK RESEARCH AND INTERVIEWS
INITIAL DRAFT
While our intention was always to interview real field crew users, we wanted to give them something to react to during our discussions. We were provided with all existing documentation on the current software, and created an initial draft of the process map based on what we could glean from those existing materials.
VALIDATION INTERVIEWS
Once we had our initial draft, we ran discussions with the field crews about their day-to-day experience, using our first pass of documentation as a tool. The interviews yielded a few useful items:
User pain points in the existing process, especially around tedious manual steps
New branches of the “create a work order” process that would be helpful to visualize as a process map
THE FINAL OUTPUT
This is about the revised diagrams output specifically for the workshop
THE IMPACT
NOTE: See if u can pull a specific pain point that was escalated Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec accumsan ac lorem porttitor pulvinar. In porttitor nisi vel lacus dignissim, id varius dui pharetra.
OUR FINAL DELIVERABLES
Clear documentation of user pain points to solve for in the new system
Diagrams designed to escalate the pain points to the right parties and facilitate discussion about the overall processes with stakeholders