Project description

One application for everyone in the construction business. The Build it application is used by a range of people looking for information on daily logs, updating schedules, marking up plans, among other things.

Designed specially for contractors, remodelers and custom builders the app helps them build more projects, complete projects at a faster pace with minimal errors, eliminate lengthy paper work and costly communication errors. It also made it convenient to add on the spot field updates and mark up blue prints for easier communication within the team.

My Role

I worked along side a small team on this project in Artistik construction. I was responsible for the research, interaction design, visual design and branding.

The Challenge

As it stands, everyone involved in a huge construction business, from architects to remodelers they have to maintain innumerable records and receipts, bills and logs, field reports, images and videos. In short, they have to collect and maintain a lot of data for each and every project.

Then they have to go through the arduous process of copying all of that data into a spreadsheet to communicate within their team and also transfer it to their accounts department.

Why Is This A Problem?

1. It is an extremely time-consuming task and when it’s your business, Time equals money.


2. If the data gets lost or damaged to the point that they are no longer legible, they cannot go through the business which means you lose out in the VAT returns.


3. Storing dozens of bills, purchase orders, proposals every week in filing cabinets,drawers are difficult to manage and maintain. This also makes tracking down individual project data a difficult task.


4. More important, no-one wants to spend their time doing the above.

My Approach

In order to design the best solution, I needed to understand the nature of construction business thoroughly and quickly. We approached all aspects of the project collaboratively and spent most of our time working on site alongside the AC team of professionals.

Throughout the project I conducted contextual inquiries, user interviews and used participatory design methods. This approach was necessary to understand the project reasoning process and the documentation process

User Research

While conducting vital user research my main points/themes of inquiry were:

1. How do you track your budget/expenses for each project?
2. How do you choose to communicate with your team members for every project?
3. How do you share information regarding project details with your team members?
4. Do you use any applications for tracking time for each project?
5. Do you use automated reminders for your tasks?
6. How do you manage your daily schedule?
7. What methods do you use to make sure the project doesn’t violate any regulatory codes?

Keeping end-users in the main focus, this helped me understand their daily work process. I heard their pain points and the system they were expecting. It helped me to craft an idea and provide them with an efficient solution.

1. Switching between multiples applications takes up lot of time and is error prone.
2. Co-relating comments and pictures for each project is very confusing.
3. Tracking and reporting time log by project is frustating
4. Using reminders for project schedules is very helpful.
5. Not having to carry bluepints to job sites can be helpful and make my life easy
6. Tracking purchase orders and bills and submitting expenses using spreadsheets is cumbersome.

Constructing the Personas

Based on the research found in the discovery period of the project two personas were developed, Michael and Antonio. Designing for Michael and Anotonio helped in making informed design decisions as I had the end user always in mind.

Mapping out The content

Before starting any design, I spent a great deal of time making sense of workflows and existing content. This involved a ton of task analysis and card sorting work. I faced particular challenges with labelling and terminology as I found that language varied between speciality contractors and older and younger generations of workers. Mapping out the workflows was also challenging as construction business involves many different touch points with many different people.

Crafting The User-Story and User-Flows

Based on the personas, I crafted the following user story. This enabled me to move fast and develop the design as quickly as possible. In order to help understand many of the complex processes involved in the construction projects, I mapped out workflows. Doing so helped me to understand the particular points where our system could help minimise some of the pain workers experienced as well as highlight opportunities where we could really try to innovate.

Wireframing

Prototyping

After conducting some initial user testing on the wireframes, and based on the feedback from them iterations were done to the design and then prototypes with the proposed visual design were created.

Key Feedback From User Testing

1. The app was well received by everyone who tested it, and they all bought into the idea.
2. A user suggested a “multiple selection” option when adding members of the project.
3. Some users preferred Monthly reports Vs weekly reports.
4. The design of ‘Leave a note’ function is not obvious. Users asked how to leave special notes for the other team members/crew.
5. One user is currently using a similar application, but preferred this concept because of its ease of use and its has monthly statistics on the top of the project screen.