IEEE- National Electrical Safety Code
This case study talks about modernising and revamping the digital experience of the world’s largest technical professional organisation dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.
First of all, I’d like to introduce the fundamentals of the Human Centred Design Thinking Process. We follow the universal Double Diamond process which follows the method of Discover → Define → Develop → Deliver.
The Double Diamond Design Process
Discover
The Discover stage is essential to identify the problem that needs solving, it consists of three main activities being
- Research
- Analyze
- Synthesize
As we move forward with the Case Study we will see how each of the activities plays a vital role in defining the problem statement.
Design Discovery Process Road map
Discovery Workshop Objective
The workshop’s goal was to understand the various user segments of IEEE SA and the challenges they face during their day-to-day tasks.
The discovery findings will assist us in understanding new ways to deliver personalized and improved experiences to NESC Business and Meeting Management Users.
Methodology
Focus group sessions were conducted with the below segments of users — NESC & Meeting Management
1. Secretariat
2. Admins
3. Product Owners
4. Editors
5. Program Managers
These sessions were focused on understanding persona roles, their daily tasks and application usage, challenges/roadblocks, and a Wishlist of features that improve productivity.
Observations from the focus group for IEEE-NESC
While conducting user sessions, extensive observations were made that will be considered for the ideation phase
Persona
I created the persona of the Program Manager of NESC after extensive interviews with secretaries of NESC.
Based on the challenges and pain points along with things that were going well in the current process, I created a User Journey Map.
Affinity Map
Let’s talk about creating an affinity map. Human beings don’t have the best short-term memory, but our spatial memory is excellent, when we look at the affinity map, our brain navigates through the data to find trends. Once we had the data, we created an Affinity Diagram to identify trends and analyse insights.
Define
Based on the affinity mapping we identified multiple trends that were grouped together and prioritised based on business requirements. These trends help define the pain points and challenges, which are synthesised into problems to be solved.
Synthesis of information through Affinity Mapping
Themes Identified :
•Human Intervention
•Human Errors
•Process Constraint
•Information Architecture
- Lack of Clarity
Observations :
•No visual status confirmation in the top navigation menu, Unintuitive navigation.
•Missing visual hierarchy, and grouping.
•Login screen un- intuitive.
•Inconsistent component design e.g.- input fields, and buttons.
•Lots of primary actions happening that have no defined prioritisation.
•Missing intimation for next steps.
•Missing visual cognitive direction for users.
•Forward or back navigation is not intuitive.
•Primary buttons/actions are not specified.
•Button states have an inconsistent hierarchy.
•Missing visual cognitive direction for users.
•The naming convention is inconsistent and confusing.
Co-relation between components is challenging to identify.
Pain points Mapping
Based on insight from the user sessions, we identified the following pain points matrix of NESC for different user groups.
(if you have made it this far, please message me for insights in this particular section as they are governed by NDAs. )
Proposed Features and Enhancements
(if you have made it this far, please message me for insights in this particular section as they are governed by NDAs. )
Based on insight from the user sessions, we identified the following features that will be helpful in delivering personalized and elevated experiences to NESC Business users
These proposed features and Enhancements were later mapped with User Matrix i.e. to identify what user groups should get access to what features.
Feature Mapping & User Matrix
Based on insights from the user sessions, we mapped identified features to respective User groups.
This brings us to the end of the Discovery sessions.
Based on the insights that were generated as an outcome of the discovery sessions, we created User flows and reiterated them based on feedback from IEEE business stakeholders.
Develop
We now move to the solution stage which consists of User flows which are then ideated into wireframes, and eventually into Hi Fidelity Prototypes.
User Flows
Program Manager — Admin’s event creation flow for NESC/IMAT
User flow: Scheduling | Attendance | Meeting notes
Step 1 — logs in to the system
Step 2 — Navigate to the ‘Create new Event’ widget/tab
Step 3 — Enters meeting event details
Step 4 — Confirm and create a session
Step 5 — Before entering the meeting, toggle on the attendance tracker and voting system
Step 6 — After the meeting, the PM exports attendance, voting and session minutes into the desired format
The program manager created a meeting for a Change Proposal Revision
The submitter submits CP in the system
User flow: CP submission
Step 1 — The Submitter opens the landing page/dashboard and Clicks on Create Chane Proposal (CP).
Step 2 — In the Create CP Screen, the User gets a preview of the Code, which has a provision to trigger a CP from every Rule/section.
Step 3 — Triggers the CP creation from the desired Rule No/Section
Step 4 — The Section/Rule No is fetched by the system. The user enters the details of the change proposal.
Step 5 — Review and confirm details and submit CP.
Step 6 — Receive a submission confirmation message.
Step 7 — The user can now view the CP in his dashboard
Submitter creates a Change Proposal in the IEEE — NESC platform
Wireframes
The next step was to begin identifying user stories for each persona and creating wireframes.
- Submit a Change Proposal
Wireframe for Submitting a Change Proposal
2. Submit a Change Proposal (Version 2)
Prototypes: —
After multiple iterations and including feedback from IEEE stakeholders, Here’s a link to an example prototype that can be viewed on Figma, click here.
Prototypes example screens
Delivery
The final stage of the Design Thinking process was to hand over the design to developers as well as present it to the IEEE Business stakeholders. Something which seems so straightforward, but in reality is full of hurdles, and doubts from clients, and developers. The IEEE stakeholders had quite a few assumptions based on prejudices as they had been using the product for a long time and were used to their own ways of working, while presenting the prototypes I’d often refer to our extensive insight report which is also shared above, to validate assumptions and answer any questions with an evidence-based method. The IEEE project was one of the most influential projects I’ve worked on and this product is something which directly affects the lives of people around the world, as they’re in the business of setting benchmarks, standards and codes in various fields of engineering.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me at rkrishan@ieee.org
Thanks!