Background
Timeline
3 weeks
Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
Product Manager x1
UIUX Designer x1
FE & BE & QA Engineers x 3
Responsibility
Research
UX & Interaction design
UI design
Traditional production process in the manufacturing industry largely relied on “paper documentation” to track and manage all the information and data required during production process, such as product specs, transfer records, purchase orders, quality inspection, and all sort of administrative tasks.
The most obvious disadvantages of this method is inefficiency of collaboration as information all required to be physically viewed and documented, no data could be easily harvested and analyzed, not to mentioned that the inconsistency of documentation format.
This platform using QR code as info carriers throughout production processes, data could be efficiently collected and sent between roles. Either for management levels to monitor production progresses, or for workers in different workstations to know situations in real time.
However, material info from raw materials, work in progress, to finished products have massive amount of info to be documented onto QR codes, the original QR scanning experience eventually failed to support the information overload in material management.
Task
Context Research
To sort out all tasks required QR code scanning in the production process and gathered the information needed in different workstations.
I.A. Restructure
To provide an improved experience for workers in all scanning scenarios, and restructure the information architecture.
Action
Regarding the types of this company’s past clients, including injection molding, machining, wood, and assembling, the initial info set on the QR code scanning were enough for them.
However, detailed info regarding date, batch, and specification became necessary as new types of clients signed contracts, including chemical, food & drink, and electronic devices.
Therefore, through interviews with customer success agents assigned to new clients, I applied my most preferred method —- tables, to gather and organize the required info.
Given that QR code scanning was used throughout this platform, I went over the platform and sort out all sub-flows with QR code scanning. I began with workstations and high-level tasks, such as product execution, material management, and quality inspection.
Then, in order to communicate with stakeholders (3 PMs) and estimated the development resources as the set of info display in different parts was slightly different, I aimed to align the needs and maintain the consistency of what should be displayed in QR code canning.
Design
“ QR codes could be scanned in different ways, and there would be layers in QR code grouping. ”
During my previous on-site survey in the nearest clients’ factory, I found out their workers in the production stations didn’t use smart phones as scanning devices. Instead, they had cameras place aside by their logistics baskets and put finished products close to camera to be scanned, and the product info would be displayed in nearby tablets placed on tablet holders.
Also, another chemical client’s products were contained by small sealed bags on tall shelves, scanning by smart phones’ back camera wasn’t ideal for them. Therefore, they found devices with top cameras, so that they can easily scan products in bags and check thorough details of each bags, which made the display of thorough info quite important.
According to different type of RAW MATERIALS, to digitally move products around in different phases, there were different number of raw materials, work in progresses, and finished products grouped into one QR code.
Therefore, during the scanning, workers might scan a few to dozens of child-QR-codes onto one parent-QR-code within one scan, added or deleted certain QR codes, and key in information at once as the same batch of items usually share the same information.
I prioritized the information set in layers based on the needs of different contexts, for clients that only required rough amount info such as machining, wood, and assembling, workers would see general numbers of each batch on the scanning layer per scan.
As for clients of processing food, drink, and chemical who required strict and clear info of products, beside they could see the detailed info of the most recent scans on the second layer in the bottom, they could also view all scanned QR codes when scrolling up the second layers.
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Outcome
Some clients furthered to purchase bigger tablets to support their senior workers who required reading glasses. Overall, new clients were satisfied with the flexibility of different amount of information displayed during their scanning.
You can also find me on 💁
- 👨🏻💻 Resume
- 🎨 Behance
- 📱 +61 493704787
- 📧 a870588@gmail.com