UX case Study

Move.

September 2022 - October 2022

An UX Case study to identify bottlenecks in Robotic Startups

Team

1 Researcher

Role

Project Lead

UX Researcher

UX Writing

Tools

Figma

Python

Problem

The lifecycle of Robots are complex. To build robots Robots are complex. Successful robots are build with the coordination of various teams distributed across sales, marketing, software and hardware. This is complex. Where are the bottlenecks? How can we solve it?

Solution

For this project I take the role of a "Researcher as an Engineer" and take part in the daily activities of the startup. Using UX research methods such of Ethnography, User Interviews, and Co-Design, I identify core problems and develop an prototype application covering various corners of the problems.

TL;DR

Identifying Stakeholders

We identified 5 major stakeholders that influence the lifecycle of a Robot.

Sales and Marketing
Software Engineering
Hardware Engineering
Leadership
Deployment Team

Methodology

The project is generative in nature, hence we use the following research methods

Ethnography
Stakeholder Interviews
Co-Design | Participatory Design

Ethnography

"I have no clue what the sales team promised the client for this robot, and I do not care I am just going to write basic code and fix it latter"

As part of the ethnographic step I took the role as a "Researcher as an Engineer". I leveraged my engineering skills to seamlessly fit into different teams across the firm. I took part in the daily team activities of both the software, hardware and deployment teams. While working I carried out conversations with the employees to understand where employees had problems. Some of the problems Identified were:

Lack of information communication between teams
Lack of single point reference per robot
Lack of agreement and awareness of protocols and standard operating procedures
Assumption of domain expertise by teams. For example, deployment of robot involves high end software programs unfamiliar to the deployment team, creating serious bottlenecks.

Stakeholder Interviews

"Yeah, I will need to talk with the sales team to understand what they are selling to the customers, and the software team to see what features they have at this point"

To understand the perspective of leadership I conducted stakeholder interviews. I did 1:1 interviews to understand if they are aware of problems, faced by teams and robots. My questions were open ended and aimed to understand leaderships understanding of robot performance, customer insights and how teams are communicating between themselves. We identified the following:

Centralized information flow
Lack of aggregation for actionable insights and resource distribution
Lack of insight into what SOPs have been established and the efficacy of the SOPs

Co-Design Activities

"I can not send ROS commands, I do not get it. The deployment is very stressful with the client always on your head, it has to be simple. Something like this..."

In this research activity we borrow a popular UI technique called Quick 8s (we were working with CEOs and busy employees hence stuck to quick 4s). We present users with 4 blank phone screens and ask them to sketch 4 screens that would help them in their work. There is no right or wrong screen. Through this activity we were interested to know the most pressing problem and see an employees perspective towards solving the problem.

Illustrations from the co-design activities

From the co-design activities we draw the following interpretations:

Employees want minimal interaction but maximum information gain.
Employees want simplified technical solutions.
Leadership needs data aggregation, and better insight into robot performance.

Design Suggestions

In this project I was consulted for conducting research and understand bottlenecks in their production pipelines. Supporting their design process post the insights I generated, I designed some prototypes shown below: