Air Liquide - emaintenanceORKLIB

2021

# USER RESEARCH

#UX DESIGN

Air Liquide is a world leader in gases, technologies and services for industry and health.

Air Liquide produces and delivers all types of gases such as oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen from its own industrial sites.

On these sites, numerous technicians perform predictive and corrective maintenance tasks to maintain and repair the equipment needed to keep the site running smoothly.

A loss of maintenance information on gas production sites has been identified by several site managers. This leakage of information is causing errors and delays, and disrupting the tracking history.

That's why I was invited to talk to 5 technicians, to find out more about their jobs, understand their daily routine and identify the problem they were reporting. These technicians came from 3 different geographies: France, Benelux and the Philippines.

Following these interviews, here are the problems reported:

- The software is described as "unintuitive" and "complicated".
- Non-flowing process (working with a computer in an office, printing paper, returning to the office if paper is missing, notes on paper, returning to the office, software completion).
- Some urgent tasks take over. Filling in the software is not automatic, and notes pile up.
- As the sites are outdoors, the notes sometimes become illegible because of the weather.

Following these interviews, I created a list of user journeys in order to put face to face the problems discovered and each of the contexts in which they appear.

Then, with the customer, we defined that we would create a tablet application. This would be attached to a harness so that technicians could keep their hands free.

The next step was to define all the functionalities that would be present in the app and to create associated user stories. The functionalities were then prioritized, sorted and validated with the 5 technical users.

I then began to bring all the ideas to life by synthesizing and prioritizing all the paths that would be taken through the app.

To achieve this, I produced a "zoning" and then a series of wireframes.

As the last interviews concluded on a positive note and the technicians' desire to participate, I decided to invite them to a first prototype test with the wireframes created (the prototype was created in Figma, and the testers were given a link to access it during the test and shared their screens with me).

In this way, the wireframes were modified over the course of the interviews, then validated and passed on to the UI designer.

© 2024 Laure Poulard