The client
Our client is one of the world’s leading steel manufacturers, with a rich legacy spanning over a century and a presence in over 50 countries. The safety management portal is a robust and detailed system ensuring the highest level of safety standards for their employees and operations. The enterprise portal, which is 12 years old, holds a complex structure of safety management processes and is used by employees working on the plant floor, in corporate offices, and in IT.
The problem
Redesigning the outdated and cluttered 12-year-old management system posed challenges. With a large number of users having different expectations, there was a high learning curve for new onboarded members. The cluttered navigation lacked recall value, resulting in users getting lost. The system was manual, with repeated tasks in similar categories and long, tedious forms for small tasks, offering no useful insights.
Learning Curve
- New users take a long time to understand the system.
- They have to undergo multiple hours of workshop for training.
- It takes up a huge chunk of their time to locate tasks on the portal.
Motivation
- Long and tedious forms must be filled out to log an observation or incident.
- Manual workflows are difficult to follow.
- Cluttered navigation makes tasks hard to perform.
Device Optimisation
- The portal is not optimized to work on different devices such as web, tablet, and mobile phone.
- Workflows that require taking pictures and uploading them via phone become difficult.
Action Management
- The assigned action to users are not easy to access
- Too many email triggered for the same action
- The portal doesn’t give notification about pending or overdue actions
Insights and Reports
- The portal is utilized for inputting all safety management data, encompassing observations and incidents.
- However, it does not assist users in generating consolidated reports on these observations and incidents
The solution
Refresh the look and feel of the portal. Redesign the information architecture with clear workflows. Divide the portal into RRR structuring, where each ‘R’ represents a module section with specific workflows. Modules are divided into Record, Respond, and Review buckets. Reduce cognitive load for users through intuitive workflows with high recall value. Divide long forms into steps for easier completion. Include insights and report pages in a hierarchical manner.
Easy and Intuitive
Structured the portal into easy to understand workflows by breaking the portal and increasing visibility of task per module. Ideated a dynamic homepage which shows the most relevant tasks and modules for each user.
Navigation
We created an expanded version of the navigation that gives full control to the user by showing the required module name and a consistent iconography for better recall and all time access to navigation.
Responsive Design
Some tasks require the users to upload the images that are clicked on the site this is now facilitated by the responsive design of the portal. We kept the design on mobile phone, tablet and web the same for increased recall in user.
Notifications
We included notifications for each step after assigning of a task to the user. Once the task is assigned the user gets a notification, it repeats after sometime until it is executed and it shows prominently if the target date is close, or overdue.
Seamless Reports
The system now gives data dumps along with the raw data which can be filtered down to a single value in order to create reports for a specific level of hierarchy in user designation and organisational units.
Our work in action
Easy Access
Reduced no. of steps by 70% (from 10 steps to 3 to record an incident) making the portal highly intuitive
Time-to-Task
New interface reduced time to take action on incidents (record & review) has reduced by 25% i.e. from 10 mins to 2 mins
Faster decision making
New UX provides personalized dashboards with deeper safety insights to make faster decisions