SERVICE & PRODUCT DISCOVERY RESEARCH
HYBRID HAUL TRUCK ANALYTICS for MINES
SYNOPSIS
Analytics dashboard supporting the decarbonization conversion of a Mining Haul Truck.
COMPANY / CLIENT
First Mode
ROLE
Lead User Researcher
CROSS FUNCTIONAL TEAMS
Product Management | Software Product Development | Project Management | Modeling & Simulation
BACKGROUND & CONTEXT
First mode is an engineering product startup company aiming to decarbonize the mining industry. The approach is a hybrid diesel-electric program that converts existing diesel truck to capture and store downhill brake energy and reimplement it during normal driving.
PROJECT SCOPE &
PROBLEM STATEMENT
As the hardware portion of the program is progressing, First Mode looks towards defining & designing the customer experience portion of the Hybrid Truck Trial Program. Realizing a digital product will be critical to the customer's experience, the product team has the following request:
How does a Digital Analytics Tool help communicate to the customer stakeholders the Hybrid Truck Trial Program performance?
The product team and I both understand that defining the Digital Analytics Dashboard is just the micro view of the product research goal. The macro view is actually defining and developing the holistic customer experience accounting for their entire organization. Given there are 2 distinct needs, I listed the following research goals:
GOAL - Micro
Start with the Mine Site General Manager as our target user
Investigate into the following:
General Manager’s needs for his job responsibilities
Ideal Metrics & features of the Digital Analytics
Appropriate timing during trial program that they will review the necessary performance metrics.
GOAL - Macro
Which contextual activities and users will contribute to the General Managers assessment of the trial program?
*This is formulated with the understanding that the mine is really an ecosystem of 50+ users, each contributes to resolving the General Manager's goals & needs. Gathering these insights will start to illustrate the holistic customer experience journey map and evolve into service blue print map with which we can identify various digital product opportunities.
A quote from mining industry's Electric Mine Conference that further reinforces the above:
RESEARCH GOALS
“Involving those on-the-ground users during the early stages to really understand how your system works, that’s definitely the key to successful new technology implementation.”
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY & COLLATERAL
One of the main challenges is limited access to Customer Leadership Stakeholders that can provide insights defining a General Manager's needs; these stakeholders have limited time and are on time zones continents away. Therefore I applied the following mixed method approach to combat this challenge:
Audit existing product/user literature
Set up 10 qualitative interviews, 6 of which are a mix of internal stakeholders w/ extensive mine-site working experience and mine personnel from a nearby Washington Mine. This is to compensate for limited customer stakeholder access.
Composed first drafts of the following visual research collaterals in order to expedite user understanding of the research topics during interviews. I created these frameworks for the Junior Researcher to use as we collectively paint a more holistic picture of the Service Design experience.
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A tiled mock up made of analytic metrics. User Subjects can:
Interactively prioritize the metric tiles.
Thought exercise to see if any additional features / metrics are missing.
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Outline format rather than a rigid Questionnaire Script. Use Subjects tend to be more forthcoming with previously unthought-of topics if the conversation is more fluid, allowing them more freedom to speak their minds.
Also, goals of each engagement session are clearly listed. Sometimes the goal focuses more on building relationships for future engagement sessions rather than maximizing information gathering. This is especially true of complex product use-cases that requires multiple interview sessions.
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Framework Outline for Users, Use Cases and any other relevant Context related to the Holistic HEV Program Experience.
Not expected to be filled out by the end of this phase. More to keep track the various user subject input.
Essentially a holistic System Design Map aiming to quickly easily align internal and external stakeholders.
Graphic Hierarchy & Layout facilitates the reader to easily switch between the macro and micro views of the holistic product experience. Native format is Miro which allows the reader to quickly zoom in & out to areas of interest.
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Framework to investigate:
What are all necessary service activities that lead to a positive quarterly review for the Mine General Manager?
Who are the additional users that will carry out these activities?
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Because User Subject access is limited we want to build up mutual trust. This outlines how we will go about building up the relationship so the user subjects better understand research’s impact and thus facilitate future access.
Mine GM is indeed our Primary User
Priority 1 is to get Trial Truck Operation Uptime to par during Months 0-2
Our initial assumption of Diesel Saving being primary metric is actually incorrect
Priority 2 is to then focus on the the potential Diesel Savings & CO2 reduction.
Metrics related Truck Baseline Operations will most important during Month 0-2.
Metrics related Diesel Savings won’t be important until Months 2-3.
First Mode Trial Manager will be instrumental in ramping up the truck operations
Truck Driver Behavior strongly influences regen energy capture.
The next critical stakeholders to conduct further research will be Trial Manager & Truck Driver, both of which will need their own analytical tools and digital products in order to better perform their responsibilities.
FINDINGS & ANALYSIS
Shown is an updated Service Map Progression reflective of the major research insights. (click to enlarge image)
IMPACT
PRODUCT DEFINITION
Updated Understanding of how the General Manager's needs shift over time is invaluable. Learning this early on allows the product manager to readjust the scope and timeline to better fit our primary user's needs.
EXPANDED UNDERSTANDING OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
We now better understand the extended user audience that will also be using the analytics product. Understanding how one user's actions will effect other user's needs allows us to better design the service program to fit the customer's entire organization of various users.
Though Trial Manager & Truck Driver have been identified as the next important stakeholders, the research yielded additional users as well. Below is a preliminary draft diagram relating newly identified users to the trial journey timeline.
Since so much additional insights were uncovered, I worked with the Product Manager to devise a product development roadmap and separated the action items into Immediate and Near-term Product User Research action items.
ACTION ITEMS
IMMEDIATE
Analytics Dashboard for Mine Site GM
Next round of product refinement includes:
Product Definition Research on Analytic tool details. This will include identifying
Primary hierarchy of metrics
Site GM’s existing tools used for current Mine Performance evaluation.
Continue to build the trust & relationship with User Subject
NEAR-TERM
Analytics Dashboard for FM Trial Manager
Define analytics tool use scenario for Trial Program Improvement services so the HEV truck will have the initial kinks worked out
Hypothesis - The trial Manager will need a digital Interface connecting Customers and their feedback to Product Design.
Analytics Dashboard for Mine Site Driver
Investigate the baseline driving behavior.
Analyze the Energy capture process, exploring optimization through:
Technological approaches like onboard drive compute programming
User Behavior altering and optimization.
Start to explore various Driver training approaches
Further research is needed to discover additional needs that can be turned into product requirements.
Note: All above UI mockup’s co-developed with Camille Woodthorpe
As expected, this has turned into an all-encompassing service design project in which we’re defining the holistic customer experience. The Human Centered Design team took this research of Digital Analytics tool and reframed it as an opportunity to help leadership from both external Customer and Internal First Mode organizations realize how developing the entire Product Experience can help enrich and bring additional value to the HEV Program.
Shown is a comprehensive journey map of the holistic HEV Trial Program Journey that incorporates:
Users & Use Cases
Expectation of progress
Products, Digital/Services/Physical, that addresses the expectations
Methodology that aids the development process
RETROSPECTIVE
*Notice that the resulting diagram is an amalgamation of the previously shown methodologies & collaterals. The diagram design is intended to grow and evolve with the research. It should become a toolbox that empowers the research audience, internal or external, grab the data bits and compile various points of view relevant to their specific inquiry. Essentially, it is a Design System Database of User Experience Research. Eventually, the Miro diagram becomes an outline for a Digital Database Product that can be prototyped with tools like Figma. The final aim is to make a easily accessible tool for our stakeholders to utilize in order to inform them of their product user needs.
Below are the projects that was identified as a result of the research analysis action items.
