Energy Industry UX research

How might we make field workers’ jobs easier?

ROLE: Lead Researcher
PROJECT TYPE: Ethnographic Study
RESEARCH: Qualitative, Exploratory, Foundational, Generative
TIME FRAME: 9 months

Project Summary
While contracting with a large oil and gas company, I led an international ethnographic study on how to make the lives of chemical plant field workers easier. By studying existing sites, we hoped to improve working conditions for both present and future field workers. Our findings uncovered potential improvements for safety, efficiency, and training opportunities and recommended actionable next steps which resulted in improvement projects in multiple areas across the company.

Approach
This project originally started out as a request for a set of generalized field worker personas that the project team could use to develop new in-house digital products. For this project I led a very small team of research colleagues for the first few site visits, after which transitioned to a very lean team of two while maintaining a close relationship with our stakeholders. The project team had already identified the key field worker roles they wished to know more about, and since the company was global, they agreed to expanding the study outside of the U.S. to include key international sites representative of each major global region. My original plan was to rely on job shadowing activities to capture the necessary persona data using AEIOU (Activities, Environment, Interactions, Objects, Users) as our guiding methodology.

We began by learning everything we could about the roles and workflows involved. We studied documentation and conducted multiple phone interviews with subject matter experts to gain domain knowledge so we could optimize our time with participants. We also started mapping workflows and key roles to understand the relationships between the different worker types. At this point, we decided to run a pilot study at a US site to make sure we were gathering the information we needed before starting our international travel. Everything was going according to plan, however after our first site visit report-out to the project team, it became clear that the true need was to better understand the large scale workflows those key field workers were involved in to contextualize the data we were bringing back from the field. We also discovered there was a huge amount of unexpected variation from site to site both in execution of the larger workflows and in what job duties were actually performed by which specifically named roles. Generic personas would not help this team make useful and usable products for their intended user population, so it was time to iterate on my original plan. I met with the stakeholders and the project team to make a new plan and proposed a custom data map loosely based on service design strategies that would be more appropriate for the type of data they actually needed. Luckily, everyone was in agreement and we made the pivot.

Still using the AEIOU framework to guide our data collection activities, I adjusted the research plan to reflect our new goals: to understand how our key field workers fit into their respective larger work flows, document what they were really doing on a day-to-day basis, and find out how we might make their jobs a little bit easier. We started by holding two mapping workshops at a nearby site to hear first-hand how people were approaching their work. Once we had a solid understanding of the basic workflow processes, the majority of our research activity then focused on using individual contextual interviews to pinpoint variances between sites and the major pain points workers were experiencing as they moved through the larger workflows. We continued to record our observations using AEIOU, but also observed and recorded what STEEP factors (social, technological, educational, economic, political) should also be taken into consideration before building new digital products for each site.

Unfortunately, due to budget cuts and seasonal site availability issues we were unable to conduct research at all of the originally proposed sites. However, we were able to cover three of the four proposed major markets, successfully completing multiple site visits in the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Revised Research Questions

• How do previously identified key field worker roles fit into each large scale work flow?

• What are the major pain points these key field worker roles experience within each work flow?

• What are the areas of digital opportunity that would support creating a safer, more efficient work place for key field workers?

• What are the major differences between each site’s operations?

• What are potential barriers to improving field worker job conditions?

Project Breakdown
• 1 Lead researcher
• 1-3 Assistant researchers (depending on availability)
• ~ 8 Months of research and design activities
• ~70 Individual participants from approx 7 key job roles
• 4 Full-shift job shadowing observations
• 2 Work process mapping workshops
• ~60 Individual structured interviews
• 5 Sites visits in the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific

Final deliverables took the form of a presentation and report with two data matrices- one for each major workflow process we studied. The data matrices visually mapped the differences between expected activities vs actual recorded activities end to end across the charted work flow. It also listed recorded pain points at each step of the work process by priority, highlighted areas of opportunity - both digital and otherwise, and presented recommendations based on our findings.

Project Timeline
Month 1 - Secondary research and SME interviews
Month 2 - Pilot study site visit 1 - job shadowing and individual interviews, data synthesis and analysis, initial report
Month 3 & 4 - Pivot planning and continuing secondary research, site coordination and participant recruitment for upcoming site visits
Month 5 - Site visit 2 - workshops and individual interviews, data synthesis and analysis, stakeholder update report
Month 6 - Site visit 3 - individual interviews, data synthesis and analysis, stakeholder update report
Month 7 - Site visit 4 - individual interviews, data synthesis and analysis, stakeholder update report
Month 8 - Site visit 5 - individual interviews, data synthesis and analysis, stakeholder update report
Month 9 - All data synthesis and custom data visualization for final report

Site Visits
Site visits were typically 1 week in duration and involved meeting with many types of workers from different site units. Since we were primarily a team of two, we often split forces to conduct interviews so we could maximize our time on site. We also tried to meet participants in their normal daily work environment whenever possible to develop as much contextual information as possible.

Sample Daily On-Site Schedule

Individual Responsibilities
• Create and maintain the research plan
• Communicate with stakeholders
• Participant recruitment, scheduling, and site visit coordination
• Managing data privacy practices
• Writing all field guides and interview scripts
• Training assistant researchers
• Planning and leading on-site and remote research activities
• Planning and leading mapping workshops
• Managing, analyzing, synthesizing all collected data
• Final deliverables design and presentation

Outcomes
The cheeky answer here is we learned A LOT. Not only about the workers who were generous enough to share their time with us, but also about the two workflows in question and the workflow variations that existed at each site. My strategy of collecting data using both a human-centered and workflow-centered approach gave us a holistic viewpoint that revealed multiple ways to improve worker experiences at the micro level (people), mezzo level (site), and macro level(company). The areas of discrepancy and the “whys” of the discrepancies led to a number of quick wins for the project team as well as a large backlog list for the original project team and potential improvement ideas for at least two other internal orgs that were originally uninvolved in the project.

Key Project Takeaways

Validate the user problem you’re presented with to make sure you are answering the right question and providing the right deliverable for your audience. There are many ways to do this in a respectful manner that ensures both researcher and team agree that that the research (and eventual deliverables) is headed in the right direction. In this case, the final deliverable was dramatically different from what the project team requested, but also much richer and more useful than they thought was possible from user research. We can’t expect our clients to always know all the possibilities that research can afford their project, so as a researcher, it’s important to be comfortable with explaining options and potential benefits of different approaches when necessary.

Build strong relationships with stakeholders and project team members. This research project could have been a huge failure if I had not taken the time to build some level of trust with our key stakeholder up front. When we realized the project team need was very different from what had originally been requested, I was able to quickly make the changes we needed because of that positive relationship.

Fail Fast. This is a favored mantra in UX research and design circles, and it certainly proved to be true in this case. In the end, our original stumble resulted in an even better than expected outcome. Catching the problem early and making immediate changes meant our timeline and expected budget costs remained the same, despite giving the client considerably more value.