Florian Jörgensen

Design Leadership Product Strategy AI

Work plus10

Helping workers act before a failure stops the line.

Role
UX Designer + Project Lead
Year
2020
Team
Two senior UX designers and researchers
Scope
Research, product design, branding
Recognition
Red Dot 2020 · Focus Open 2020 · German Design Award 2021 nominee

Context

When plus10 came to our agency, there was little more than a plan. The founders wanted to run an algorithm over the central data hub of a production facility and find where tiny deviations in the raw data add up to a major delay in production.

There was no product yet, no defined users and no interface. We started from scratch, and the result became Shannon: a mobile app that shows workers on the shop floor what needs to be done and how, and a dashboard where production management keeps events and solutions up to date.

  • Red Dot 2020
  • 0→1 Product
  • Industrial UX
  • Mobile + Desktop
Shannon KPI dashboard with current events and the status of each plant, and in front of it an event with its possible solutions and the steps of one solution, including a photo of the control to adjust.
Shannon: from an event in the plant to the solution that fixes it.

The challenge

An algorithm can find a pattern in machine data. That alone doesn’t prevent a stoppage. Someone in the plant has to get the information in time, understand it and know what to do, in the middle of a shift and right at the machine.

So the real question wasn’t what the analysis could find. It was who would act on it, and what they would need to do so.

The data was there. Someone still had to act on it.

Going to the shop floor

To find out what we needed to build, we went to the production facilities. We interviewed people in the relevant roles and ran shadowing sessions, following workers through their shifts to understand their pain points and the sheer scale of the environment.

Three roles stood out, each with different knowledge and responsibilities: machine operators, line leads and maintenance technicians.

Board of sticky notes titled “Insights”: how machine operators, line leads and maintenance technicians work, where they spend their time and what they are responsible for.
Insights per role: how they work, where they are, what they are responsible for.
A wall of sticky notes mapping a worker’s shift from arrival to the end of the day, in rows for daily routine, intention, action and interaction.
A worker’s shift from arrival to clocking out: what happens, what they intend, what they do, and who or what they interact with.

Workshops with the founders

What we learned in the plants became the material for a series of workshops with the founders. Together we worked out the user flow and where the solution they had in mind could actually add value, starting from what a worker needs to know to act on it.

Two photos from a workshop: three people discussing paper wireframes pinned to a board, and two people working on a board with role cards for worker, production lead and everyone.
Workshops with the founders: roles, needs and first wireframes.
Three whiteboards: a user flow of sticky notes connected by arrows, a sketched station view with a timeline and charts, and a sketched list of open and closed events with a solution panel.
From user flow to first sketches of the station view and the event list.

Two products, one loop

Shannon serves two very different situations.

On the shop floor
A mobile app for workers: the tasks of the shift, where and when something happened, and step-by-step instructions to fix it.
In the office
A dashboard for production management: events and plant status at a glance, and a place to maintain events and their solutions.

The worker app

The app shows the current tasks of a shift: a failure, material to refill, an unknown error. The most relevant one comes first, with where and when it happened and what is going on. A worker takes it over and gets the solution as a sequence of steps, with a photo that marks exactly which part to adjust.

Comments from colleagues stay attached to the task, so experience carries over from one shift to the next. And if a task can’t be finished, giving the reason takes one tap: no material, material damaged, no time, already refilled.

Three phone screens: the task list with a failure on top, the failure with location, time and a colleague’s comment, and a solution path with a photo of the control to adjust and numbered steps.
Take over a task, understand it, fix it step by step.
Two phone screens: an open failure with buttons to complete the task, cancel it or show contacts, and a dialog asking why the task is being cancelled, with predefined reasons and a free text field.
Cancelling a task: the reason is one tap away, with room for a reason of your own.

The management dashboard

On the desktop, production management sees current events across plants and the status of every line. This is also where the knowledge behind the app is maintained: events are defined and edited, and each event gets its possible solutions, ranked by how likely they are to help.

Solutions are written as steps, with photos. Workers rate whether a solution was helpful, and those ratings show up next to the solution, together with how often it was used and its history of changes.

Event management on the desktop: the list of active and inactive events, and an event being edited with its occurrence chart, possible solutions and properties such as category and location.
Editing an event: how often it occurs, its possible solutions and its properties.
Shannon KPI dashboard: a list of current events, a table of plants with status, product, average output per shift and downtime, and entry points to manage events, solutions and users.
The dashboard: current events and the status of every plant.
Editing a solution: number of uses, positive and negative ratings, version history, the events it is assigned to, and the steps with photos.
A solution with its ratings, history and steps.

What workers learn at the machine flows back into the instructions for the next shift.

Following through

From there we followed the design process: wireframe testing, an MVP, and testing every iteration. Because we stayed close to the users throughout, we were confident the product was relevant. Feedback from testing backed that up.

“I never believed such a software could be so pleasant to use.”

A user during testing, about software in a production environment.

A visual language

Alongside the product we developed plus10’s branding. In the interface it became a calm, mostly grey system with one teal primary, clear semantic colors for states, and a separate set of colors for charts and indicators.

Color palette: black and six greys, chart and indicator colors in blue, purple, pink and orange, semantic positive, warning, negative and neutral colors with background tints, and the teal primary.
The color system.
The alphabet in upper and lower case, set in three weights of a geometric sans-serif typeface.
The typeface, Relative, in three weights.

Outcome

Design awards
3
Red Dot 2020 winner in interface design, Focus Open 2020 special mention, German Design Award 2021 nominee.
From idea to product
0→1
Starting with no product, no defined users and no interface.
Senior UX designers and researchers
2
A small team, close to the founders and to the users.

During our collaboration the startup grew steadily into a scale-up, a clear sign that the product had found its market.

Florian’s impressive working attitude, deep UX knowledge, structured approach, and open-minded communication style stood out. He quickly grasped our end users’ needs and boundaries, developing transformative concepts that led to winning the red dot interface design award. I highly recommend working with him.

Felix MüllerFounder, plus10
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