SCATS design planning board
Discovery
In order to redesign SCATS we had to learn complex traffic engineering concepts, and understand the high levels of technical complexity and technical limitations of the current SCATS platform.
To do this we:
Held knowledge sharing sessions with internal subject matter experts (SMEs).
Read technical documentation and user manuals.
Conducted user research
SCATS Strategic Monitor. An example of the level of technical understanding needed to redesign SCATS.
A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing when it comes to SCATS
— Interview participant
I facilitated 38 hours of discovery with customers across 4 countries.
To gather insights, I used the following methods:
Contextual inquiries
Journey mapping workshops
Interviews
SCATS design planning board
Improvements
BEFORE
Most users only monitored the Major Alarms panel, even though different personas were worried about different alarms.
Many customers developed their own list of alarms that they were concerned with.
Users were unable to filter by alarm type, location, or time.
Major alarms panel with no ability to filter by alarm, location or time.
Current site view with no spacial awareness of what alarms are occurring at nearby sites that could lead to larger issues.
Users did not have spatial awareness of alarms because sites were presented as a list rather than visually. They often relied on third-party websites, like Google Maps, for information.
Some personas only look after certain areas of the network but are unable to quickly check that area for alarms.
Other personas manage different areas of the network every day. As a result, changes made to intersections due to alarms are forgotten about, which can negatively affect the network.
Improvements
MLP
To meet users’ needs and address their pain points, the solution needed to touch many more areas of the product than just alarms.
I proposed, and got buy-in from our PO, to design and test a blue sky concept based on discovery insights. We planned to reverse engineer the successful features to develop an alarms MVP for the BETA launch.
We agreed that an agile mindset was essential if testing was successful. This approach would ensure we could adapt if further research or delivery limitations impacted MLP delivery, and avoid the trap of waterfall delivery.
A Home dashboard where users can save and quickly view areas of the network they look after.
A map UI providing users with spatial awareness, allowing them to see integrated data from third-party providers. This saves users from jumping between different products to get a complete picture of the area they are responsible for.
The ability to filter out intersections users are not responsible for.
The ability to filter out alarm types and other information that they or their organisations don’t deem important.
The ability to set granular filter preferences for alarms.
The ability to be notified about the information a user deems important.
The ability to create and save a filter for themselves or others as they rotate around different areas of the network they are responsible for.
The ability to quickly see what alarms are occurring on the map and, based on third party integrations, what may be causing them.
Grouping site alarms by their route cause.
The ability to track an alarm so they are not forgotten when users rotate around different areas of responsibility.
An inbox where users can track and be notified of issues or updates to the network.
A family tree displaying the route cause of an issue and the affect it has on the network.
User research
I facilitated 9 usability tests with participants from 4 customers to validate blue sky designs.
Usability tests included:
Scripted tasks and questions
Ranking via an MS Forms link
Blue sky prototype validated with users
Results
— Interview participant
— Interview participant
— Interview participant
— Interview participant
10
/ 10
The score all users gave to the ability to open multiple tabs within 1 SCATS widow.
22
/ 10
The score 1 user gave to the dashboard concept. The positive sentiment was shared by all participants.
7
Of the 9 participants gave the filter concept a score of 7 or more out of 10.
2
Users had concerns over too much info on the map, and wanted to filter data from each third party integration.
Improvements
MVP
The filter concept ranked second for value in the MS Forms ranking exercise distributed to participants after the usability tests.
After discussions with Tech and our PO, we decided to prioritise the ability to filter alarms to meet the BETA deadline and iteratively roll out other concepts that tested well post-BETA.
Developed user stories, tasks and activities to help with epic prioritisation.
MVP delivery with map UI displaying non-selected map layers in an isolated state with important alarm information presented in the site indicator on both hover and by default.
I scaled the MVP solution across multiple breakpoints to accommodate users who take their devices on site when they work in the field. While designing mobile-first is considered best practice, user research revealed that the vast majority of our users operate in traffic management centres using large monitors.
The site indicator was updated to display alarm information by default and on hover, requiring a new design system component with over 2500 variants.
2500 variants for the new site indicator component.