Alert & Action: Your shovel has been hanging! 

A mining operation involves multiple pits, each overseen by a Pit Supervisor who spends their day moving around the site to address issues as they arise.

The AVM (Advanced Variance Management) app helps Pit Supervisors monitor critical operational metrics and manage tasks, but it currently lacks a robust alert system to notify users of significant deviations in these metrics.

Intro

Project goals  

Empower Pit Supervisors to respond swiftly to major time losses, prioritize their actions effectively, and track the outcomes of their decisions. The goals include:

• Timely Responses: Delays in addressing issues result in reduced productivity and operational inefficiencies.

• Prioritizing Critical Actions: With constant changes in pit conditions, Pit Supervisors often struggle to prioritize their actions effectively.

• Tracking Impact: Actions taken during shifts can be overlooked, making it difficult to justify decisions and demonstrate impact.

Team & responsibilities 

• Stakeholder: Coal sites Mine Ops leaders

• The team: UX Lead, UX Designer (me), Product Owner, SMEs, Customer Success, Technical Leads

• My responsibilities: Research, Workshop, UX&UI Design, Prototyping, Dev Handoff

Timeframe

February 2024 - June 2024

Research

Goal
To understand how Pit Supervisors are currently informed about critical production losses
The current experience with action creation in the AVM app, and
How they prioritize actions and demonstrate their impact.

Method
User interviews with 4 Pit Supervisors and 1 Senior Supervisor from 2 different mine sites (FRO, LCO)

Key Findings

Difficulty Focusing on Major Losses

• Hard to identify key losses due to constant distractions.

• Limited time to check the dashboard while monitoring.

• Prefer actions that boost multiple metrics at once.

Need for Insight into Decision-Making

• Cannot track actions or their impact on metrics.

• Need to show actions and results to Senior Supervisors.

Education on Best Practices

• Limited experience and resources lead to rework.

• No time to learn complex tools.

HMW Exercise

Themes

• HMW standardize best practices for Pit Supervisors?

• HMW help Pit Supervisors prioritize actions based on their potential impact?

• HMW enable Pit Supervisors to show the impact of their actions clearly?

• HMW assist Pit Supervisors in surfacing related metrics for more comprehensive decisions?

Brainstorm Ideas & Vote

Key ideas that emerged included:

• Reactive Action: Allow users to quickly convert alerts into actions and track their impact.

• Proactive Action: Provide system-recommended actions based on selected metrics or equipment.

• Best Practices: Show suggested root causes and action recommendations from the Book of Standards when a new alert is received.

• Shift Summary: Auto-generate shift summaries for performance reviews with Senior Supervisors.

Action Flow

The diagram outlines workflows for 3 types of actions:

1. Reactive actions triggered by alerts,

2. Proactive actions initiated from metric cards, and

3. Proactive actions led by practical experience.

This served as the foundation for the design process.

Feature 1 - Reactive: Alert to Action 

The first exploration focused on integrating Alerts into the dashboard design. I created three options showcasing various approaches and functionalities.

We selected Option 2 because Actions and Alerts are both important for our users, and it was the most realistic choice within our timeline.

User Testing

Format: Clickable prototype, 1:1 interview
Participants: 2 Pit Supervisors, 1 Senior Supervisor

Positive feedback:

• Users responded very positively to the event tracker.

• Users found the Book of Standards integration helpful, saying that it will be easy to onboard new Pit Supervisors.

• Users liked that they can view related metrics.

Things to consider:

• Manual Time Stamp Adjustment: Users asked to change the time of Event Tracker manually because they may not log them right away.

Feature 2 - Proactive: Metric to Action 

User testing

Format: Clickable prototype, 1:1 interview
Participants: 3 Pit Supervisors

Positive Feedback:

• Users found the improved data visualization more usable.

• Users reacted positively to AI-generated insights and wanted them to be more prominent.

Things to consider:

• Insight Panel Buttons: Users often missed the "Create Action" button on each Insight Card, mistakenly clicking the Primary button at the bottom and losing Insight information in the Action Details.

• AI insights visibility needs enhancement.

Present a story

Given the success of the project, we were requested to show the design ideas to the leadership team. I made a prototype using storytelling and created a video demo.