IC | Ankit

Skills Insight

Immersive Competency

Mixed/ Augmented Reality Application

Immersive Competency enables end users to learn effectively and efficiently using virtual hardware in a simulated environment without depending on the real setup from anywhere and anytime.

Background

Honeywell Immersive Competency® leverages augmented reality as a platform to provide a virtual learning environment. It avoids the hassles of maintaining expensive training systems and provides interactive and easily accessible learning content. This enables easier preparation for uncommon process control system maintenance tasks on live and critical production systems. Interactive models enable accurate planning and rehearsing of process control & safety system maintenance and troubleshooting tasks with minimal previous competency required.

My Role

As a Lead designer for the entire project, my role was:

Conduct workshops to understand the stakeholder's needs and pain-points.
Contextual research at the customer's sites across Asia & Middle East regions.
To develop user scenarios user-flows & wireframes based on end-user insights and later validate with the internal stakeholders and customers.
Deliver all final user interfaces & interactions behaviors for product development.
Usability testing with internal stakeholders as well as at the customer sites.

The Challenge

The objective of the project is to design an immersive learning experience that simulates the challenges of a running plant with real-time processes. The main challenge is to address skill gaps in the Automation Industry, reduce overall training cost and provide accessibility to the process control hardware for hands-on experiences.

Design Process Overview

Key Design Activities

Contextual Inquiry

The most rewarding research was done at the customer's sites across the Middle- East & Aisa regions by Contextual Inquiry. Observing end users during their activities at the oil & chemical plant sites. Semi-Structured Interviews were conducted to understand their daily life activities, roles, and responsibilities. Most insightful part of the research was Roleplaying, where I took the end user's place and performed their activities by myself.

Participatory Research

Automation College, Pune

Persona - Trainer

User Experience Journey Mapping

After having a clear persona, high-level journey mapping was created considering the context of the training process in Automation College. The whole training process was divided into 5 main activities and later their emotions, tasks & pain-points were mapped visually in the timeline.

Insights from field

Faster Onboarding

The average number of years of experience of engineers are reducing. Due to productivity requirements, individuals are expected to work on multiple units & with multiple skills /competency. It takes a very long time, investment & resources to keep our staff trained & updated with critical maintenance & resolution skills.

The absence of the required skill level can result in human errors, resulting in a plant safety incident. How will it affect my Plant’s safety system? How will it comply with our plant safety policies? Task execution on a virtual platform before actual execution.

Plant Safety

Improved Efficacy

How do we ensure that the trainees retain their learning for longer periods and capable of confidently addressing real plant scenarios?

User Experience Design

Storyboarding

Defined user flows for the identified use cases along with the product manager and engineering team. Developed detailed storyboarding to validate with the stakeholders before jumping into the final design.

Design Framework for Mixed & Augmented Reality

Defined overall user interface design elements and interactions behaviours. The main focus for the user interface and interaction design was to achieve simplicity in the product for the better accessibility to the content along with the contextual feedbacks so that user can perform their tasks with ease and comfort.