Designing Electronic Control Of Work Dashboard
Dashboard is a visualization of some of the data collected. In an application, web or mobile, the dashboard is also commonly used as a homepage which not only displays a resume that is useful for making decisions but also becomes the main access to navigation in using the application.
Overview
Oil and gas is an industry that has a high level of risk. To ensure that every activity, whether maintenance or project, can be completed safely, a system that controls every job is needed. Currently, we are developing a system that aims to change our control of work system from paper-based to digital-based through a web app called Electronic Control Of Work with the hope of increasing the efficiency of job monitoring and application, also improving documentation of all activities in the work site.
Opportunity
With the dashboard, we expect a resume of every activity being carried out in the work area as well as assisting stakeholders to support activities related to the application, starting from creating documents, conducting reviews and assessments, giving approvals and increasing efficiency in monitoring activities being carried out by the worker.
Roles
Currently, I am only involved as one of the stakeholders in the full project that is currently in the MVP testing phase. I am responsible for the full design process in this dashboard design as exploration as input for the developer team.
Research
Before carrying out the define phase, I did preliminary research through 2 stages, where I studied documents and procedures related to the control of work currently owned by the company to get deeper into the domain knowledge and observed the implementation of control of work to understand the user behavior, especially in the offshore area.
Studying the documents helped me to understand the systems and procedures that apply deeper and observations helped me understand the best practices that have been carried out by the team so far.
User journey mapping
After finishing my research, I put my observations in the form of a user journey mapping. In this user journey, I try to define each step starting from the arrival of the contractor or worker who will do the work on the site until the completion of the work.
What I love about the user journey is it can help me to define the user activities while giving me chance to ideate based on the actual journey.
Information architecture
In order to organize the groups and hierarchies of the dashboard display so that they are well organized and easier to understand, I created an information architecture that helps me get a better picture in making visualizations of the dashboard later.
Low Fidelity Design
It’s time for design! After some sketches were drawn using pen and paper, I compiled some parts and moved it to digital form using Figma. For the digital, I started by creating the Lo-Fi to get better attention to the information and hierarchy.
Designed as information architecture I’ve created, the dashboard is split into 2 main parts, navigation and data visualization. The navigation contains the profile of the users and the option to access every form provided by the system to support work activities on-site and added with audit section which makes the Control Of Work system complete.
For the visualization, I start the first section by show permit status monitoring where all stakeholders can understand how many Permits that currently in the approval process. The second section shows Highlight Activities, 7 categories of activities that were chosen by the company as Golden Rules and needed special attention. The third card shows the activities based on risk level which is split into 2 categories, low and medium risk levels. Knowing how many jobs are categorized as either low or medium, it is hoped that it can help management in carrying out supervision and decision-making. And the last section, show permit issued per period that show how many permits has been issued.
Getting feedback
After the low fidelity was created, I came to some users to get feedback. This time, I bring my design to some of the HSSE department members. I explained about the dashboard design that I made and asked them for input about the design. Overall, the information displayed is sufficient, especially for the MVP program which still focuses on the most important things in the Control Of Work, permit to work and risk assessment application. However, they are interested in breaking down the map of the work area deeper down to the platform level where it is hoped that they can also see what activities are on each platform.
Final design
Based on the feedback I got, I iterated on the previous dashboard design. Inspired by our online HSE observation card, I moved the checkbox area on the permit issued and risk level card to the top position and turned it into a filter for the entire data visualization. Changing the appearance of the initial design will help management from each site location to focus on monitoring their respective areas, on the other hand, it can still provide a broad picture for top-level management.
Audit navigation has a different color where currently disabled. It aims to help users to understand what section can be accessed based on the role they currently using.
Conclusion
This is the design process that I did to create a dashboard for Electronic Control Of Work. From making this design, I learned to manage existing data and use it to help the management team to optimize the application for activities monitoring and document approval. In addition, learning from my first case study, I tried to get feedback after completing a low-fidelity design with actual copywriting which turned out to be easier for me to communicate the designs I made. This design will continue to be developed following the next update where currently it can only be used to make a permit to work and risk assessment.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to drop comments for improvement. See you in the next article!
