Industry Sponsored Project
ABB Workplace Re-design
Project Overview
Cyber Security Work Place is currently a feature that ABB offers to power plants and affiliates to manage and secure their system. This allows users to achieve an automated updating system, on-hand backup storage, viewable status, and internet connection. This is another layer of security, to which an ABB certified employee will push out updates and check reports. However, there are a few pain points with Work Place including, but not limited to, not having an intuitive UI, to which is clear and precise, and not having enough information about how users interact with the system.
Challenge: Conduct in-depth research into the underlying issues of the Workplace system and use those insights to re-design the Workplace interfaces.
Our Solution
Two different mid-fidelity wireframe flows. The first flow can be implemented immediately by ABB. The second flow is a complete overhaul and is what we see Workplace looking like down the road. We also provided extensive research and proto-personas.
Project Length
16 Weeks (Semester Long Project), January 2019 - May 2019
Learnings
Sketching, Analogous Research, Heuristic Evaluation, Interviewing, Digital Prototyping, Usability Testing
Team
Delaney Rundell Maddisen Sharpe Kevin McDonald
Adam Kaufman Lucca McKay Kyle Milne
Shelby Benton Annie Giang Jack Bannon
My Contributions
Co-lead a team of 9 UX designers and managed the project process throughout the semester.
Conducted in-depth research through analogous research, interviewing, heuristic evaluation, and secondary research.
Collaborated on the creation of mid-fidelity wireframes and usability tested their functionality
What I Learned
This project was my first time being a co-lead and I learned an extensive amount about team management. I quickly learned how to delicate work and make sure that the whole team was in a holistic state of mind throughout the project. I also gained experience communicating directly with our ABB sponsor and facilitating our team meetings.
HEURISTIC ANALYSIS
Goal: To find Work Place’s baseline usability pain points
For the heuristic analysis, we used Nielsen and Molich’s 10 usability heuristics. The results of the heuristic analysis will be used to ensure that the problems found will be addressed in our end solution.
The Results
After analyzing each usability heuristic, we identified 3 major flaws with Workplace’s existing design that were most crucial to address.
Match between system and the real world
Recognition rather than recall
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Takeaways
Feedback Visualization - Notifications regarding device status should be more easily identifiable.
Wording - The language used throughout the application should be more user-friendly and simplified.
Visual flow - The overall hierarchy and setup of menus and tabs should be consolidated in order to simplify functionality and achieve increased clarity.
Modernize user interface design - Color scheme should be updated to match ABB branding (white/gray with hints of ABB reds) and current design trends.
ANALOGOUS RESEARCH
Goal: Gain insights as to how well-known applications on-board users and create a great experience. Then use those insights to create improvements for Workplace and to make it a more intuitive experience for users.
Each member of our team chose one application, from above, to perform analogous research on. In order to categorize features and identify common themes among applications, we used the following questions to document our findings:
Target Audience
Purpose
How does the software contextualize information/tips?
How does the system link to other tools/devices?
What is this company’s strongest or most attractive feature?
How does the overall flow between the companies applications add to their User Experience?
Insights
Help/Feedback Menus - We found that these types of services often have easily accessible help/feedback menus that give users insight into their program and resources should they need it. If this could somehow be incorporated into Work Place, then operators would most likely feel more comfortable in operation of the application, given that they could fall back on the help menus in the case that they need it.
Collaboration - One of the major themes we were able to derive from analyzing all the applications was collaboration. Each service provides options to work together in various project environments to allow for widespread task management. Even if these platforms are dealing solely with file sharing or the transferring of funds, some aspects of their core functionality could be beneficial in improving the usability of Work Place.
Structured & Simplistic Design - All the applications we analyzed used up-to-date clear graphical interfaces and well thought through application structure. In the case of Workplace, its interface is very outdated and incredibility confusing for an outside user to use.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Goal: Learn about the field of cyber security and how to properly design for a current system being used everyday.
There were 4 topics that we conducted secondary research on: How to Design for Security Systems, How Users’ Adopt to Change, Password Standards, and Permission Request.
Design for Security Systems
• Stay away from repetitive security designs
• Find the habits of the users when navigating the system
• Have a balance between a simple UI and a level of complexity
How Users’ Adopt to Change
• Look deeper into the redesign than just new features
• Stick to the companies original vision
• May be some possible kickback from learning new design
Password Standards
• Useful statistics about hackable passwords
• Password Blacklist
• What makes a password hackable
Permission Request
• Greatly decreases the chance of a unauthorized login
• Multiple factor authentication
• Avoid reliance on telecommunication
PRIMARY RESEARCH
Goal: Gain professional insight on security systems and their users.
We originally tried reaching out to local power plant companies to conduct interviews. Due to sensitive information and high-level security, were not able to access any information. Our second best option was to interview professionals with experience in the cyber security space, but were not actively working for a power plant company.
Takeaways
Workplace is built on Symphony Plus
Four main functions of Workplace
Focus on usability and functionality over visuals
Provided cyber security Workplace manual
Takeaways
Provide at least 2 layers of authentication for extra security
Define roles of each user
Provide the least amount of privileges as possible
Avoid using weak passwords
Takeaways
Provided reactor operator insights
Installation process insights
Overview of operator's roles
Industry insights about cyber security within power plants
PERSONAS
Proto-personas are different from traditional personas as they are not based off of insight from actual users; rather, from secondary research and expert interviews. We created proto-personas due to the fact that we were unable to get in contact with any actual engineers or power plant administrators. We constantly referenced these personas to remind ourselves exactly who we were designing for throughout the project.
Our four personas reflect the four roles that are most closely involved with the ABB Workplace software. One unusual addition was the anti-persona, representing an individual who is attempting to break into the power plant system. With a hacker persona created, we could design to combat their specific goals and motivations.
PAPER PROTOTYPING
Before beginning to sketch initial prototypes, we divided our team into two groups, each designing a specific version of Workplace: “Redesign” and “Future Design.” The “Redesign” version had smaller and less drastic changes to the UI. Due to many ABB employees already knowing how to utilize the Workplace software, we believed that a more minimal redesign with more seamless changes would not entirely alter current users’ mental models. The “Future” version is a complete rework of the Workplace interface and we hope Workplace could look like this in the long-term future. We implemented drastic changes that would solve a numerous amount of UI issues in addition to several new screens that improve the overall system flow.
Examples of “Redesign” Version Screens
Examples of “Future” Version Screens
TESTING
Goal: To determine if the changes we made to interface were functional and clearly understood by users.
Participants: We tested 8 novice users who have never used ABB’s Workplace before.
For both the redesign and future design, we used a testing protocol to conduct usability testing in order to assess the ease of use and screen flow of the software. We also conducted A/B testing to see how our new versions compared to the current design of Workplace. After each round of testing, we would ask a series of follow-up questions, which helped us identify areas of improvement within our designs. We conducted two rounds of user testing, iterating after each round of testing. It is important to note that due to the complexity of Workplace, we only redesigned the most important screens and tabs within the software.
FINAL SOLUTION
We utilized the insights from our multiple rounds of testing to create mid-fidelity wireframes of both the “Redesign” and “Future” version screens. Along with that, we provided our sponsors with a 137 pages documentation of our entire research and design process.