ProField User Research

Overview

ProField is a full suite of software, data management, and workflow planning tools for advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) deployment for smart grid planning, meter deployment management, and post rollout operations. I started working on ProField after I joined Aclara in March 2018 as a UX architect. Aclara is a world-class supplier of smart infrastructure solutions (SIS) to more than 1000 water, gas, and electric utilities worldwide. ProField started out as software alongside the smart meter deployment services. With the growth of the business, the old application user interface, navigational style and workflow started to look dated and not user friendly. We started our user research process before we set out for the complete revamp of the product.

Project Goal

Understand and identify different kinds of users of ProField
Created personas for ProField users
Understand different users’ journey with ProField
Create user journey maps for ProField users.

My Role

I’m the only UX designer supporting ProField. Working with product manager and product owner of ProField, we collaboratively defined the product’s roadmap. I was responsible for interviewing various kinds of internal and external users to understand their usage of the product, collecting usage data and conducting user surveys and focus groups to identify trends. User personas and journey maps were created as a result of this effort.

Skill/Tool Used

User Interview
Stakeholder Interview
Focus Group
Persona
User journey Map
Sketch

ProField Personas

After analyzing the data, I determined there were 4 main internal users of the system: operations manager, field supervisor, warehouse manager, and customer service representative. The most common frustrations for all users were system instability, slowness, and confusing functionality. Their frustrations with the system vary based on their specific job responsibilities and workflows. See each persona for detail.

Persona: Philip Martin, Operations Manager (also titled Project Manager) — oversees the project, wants jobs finished on time and on budget, frustrated by slow weekly routing and weak data filtering in ProField

Persona: Jesus Lambert, Field Supervisor — spends most time in the field on problem escalation, frustrated by time-consuming escalations, printing route sheets daily, and poor GIS information

Persona: Allen Ball, Warehouse Manager — manages inventory and assigns meters, frustrated that he can’t change a meter’s shelf location and status at once and that status search is unreliable

Persona: Irene Cruz, Customer Service Representative — books appointments across 14 projects from home, frustrated by slow customer lookup, screen switching, and redundant manual data entry

ProField User Journey Maps

I also created user journey maps for each persona. They illustrated their overall workflow, and the emotional and cognitive journey they went through in their work.

Operations Manager journey map across planning, customer communication, routing, technician monitoring, problem escalation, and reporting — with emotions, actions, and opportunities per step

Field Supervisor journey map through his ProField workflow, charting emotional highs and lows with actions and improvement opportunities at each step

Warehouse Manager journey map through his ProField workflow, charting emotional highs and lows with actions and improvement opportunities at each step

Customer Service Representative journey map through her ProField workflow, charting emotional highs and lows with actions and improvement opportunities at each step

Personas and Journey maps created during user research phase serve as a starting point for product redesign planning, ideation and product roadmap. They are also a part of the effort to turn the company’s development culture from a mostly system-centric one to a user-centered design approach. This project was used as a model for organization-wide adoption of user-centered design process.

Photo of the printed personas and journey maps mounted as large posters along an office wall above the filing cabinets

The ProField product team turned user personas and journey maps into posters and hung them on the office hallway. So we can keep them in mind when we design in our daily work. It was so satisfying for a UX designer to see my work turn into physical artifacts in our workspace.