Kinetic designs wearable devices for warehouse workers that gather

data on lifting movements to calculate the risk of injury. Workers receive

immediate haptic feedback when making high-risk lifts, and the data is

also pushed to the safety managers, via a website dashboard.

GOAL

Create an MVP dashboard highlighting key metrics to

motivate managers to use the system.

I was part of three-person team. While I was involved in each phase of the process, I was focussed on the visual

end — sketching, wireframes, and prototypes.

MY ROLE

STUART

Safety/Line ManagerWorks for medium-sized facility

43 years old21 years of experience. Worked up to his current position. Understands workers.

Tech Affinity: Medium/LowUses PC for email from main office and to generate reports

Goals“Eliminate. Isolate. Minimize.”

Find a way to motivate the workers to take care of themselves (using familylife, etc.)

Teaching correct technique is very important

Behavior

On the floor daily, perhaps half his time is spent interacting with

workers and team leaders. Helps with lifting technique when he sees

the need.

“…Need a course of action based on what is reasonably practicable.”

Challenges

Too much paperwork

Difficult to monitor individual workers

Training new staff is burden

Manual handling is a necessary evil

Needs

Actionable information

To refresh worker training

MEET STUARTStuart is one of four personas we created after interviewing six managers and two workers. We focused on Stuart because as a hybrid Safety/Line Manager who interacts with workers as well as the managers above him., he would use a variety of functions of our dashboard.

We found that managers want information that they can act on in a meaningful way to motivate workers to be safe. They often have only a few minutes a day to meet with their workers, so key metrics should be the first thing they see:

1. Target percentage of high-risk lifts for workers to hit

2. Lifts: number and percentage of high-risk and low-risk

3. Employee Lifts: number, percentage, etc.

4. Employees: Improved or At-Risk

5. Reports (Create, Print, Save, Email)

WHAT INFORMATION DOES STUART NEED?

Interaction flow chart

STUART

We created an interaction flow for the various positions in the organization which helped us figure out what functionalities would be helpful to show Kinetic (and for Stuart)

WHAT FUNCTIONALITY DOES STUART NEED?Stuart needs data to report to his manager, and share with the workers who report to him.

WHAT FUNCTIONALITY CAN WE GIVE STUART?We mind mapped possible functionalities for our dashboard and created a feature map to focus our design direction.

We used design studios to iterate ideas for the dashboard. After each studio, we took the best ideas and began again.

We chose a modular approach, to group similar information together and to limit the amount of data to make key information easier to find. More granular information would be easily findable on secondary pages.

WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE?PART I: SKETCHES

Main page v2

Report page v2

WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE?PART II: WIREFRAMES

We learned the key, actionable metric was the percentage of high-risk lifts. With this information, a manager can target specific team members and get them more training to help them avoid injury.

1 2

4 3

5Stuart receives an alert mail about his

team having missed their target

He views his dashboard to gather

infomation

He looks at a new hire’s information,

too see how he is doing

Stuart goes to the Employee Detail

Page for information about the team

He prints out a weekly report to take

with him when he talks to his team

before work begins

HOW WILL STUART USE IT?A Kinect dashboard flow for Stuart on an average first day of his work week.

DOES IT WORK?

Initial testing, good first lessons in clarity

Initial testing on paper showed our key metric took too much time to decipher. So we simplified. Managers need to know who needs

help. The target number is known by the manager, so doesn’t need to be highlighted,

and the low-r isk l i f ts percentage is unnecessary information.

Main page v3

Key MetricSimplified

Pop Up v1 Pop Up v3 Pop Up v6 Pop Up v7 (final)

1 2

3

Having pie charts and bar graphs for

similar information was confusing.

Got rid of the pie charts.

Yellow was used as an accent color elsewhere and its use here was confusing. Went back to red, the established color for numbers over target.

There continued to be confusion about if the numbers were a “score” or percentage. Added a % in the description. Also added a date-range, for clarification.

CAN YOU IMPROVE ON THAT?An example of evolution through iteration.

The pop up window is intended to offer managers more data about the worker to put current performance in context. But the initial design confused users.

WHAT DID I LEARN, DESIGNING FOR STUART?Clarity leads to strong design. Our research was crystal clear on two points: our users wanted actionable information and they wanted to be able to read it quickly. Keeping that in mind at every step gave us something to measure our ideas against, which lead to better choices.