Maximl’s mission is to empower smart factories of tomorrow and seamlessly connecting data and decisions within traditional industries.
I was part of an ambitious project to design a collaborative plan snippet platform for creating and sharing the plan during the planning phase of the project.
To follow my non-disclosure agreement, I even have overlooked and obfuscated personal records in this case study. All records in this example case study is my personal and does not always mirror the perspectives of Maximl.
I was a part of a small team of designers, engineers, project manager and product analysts. I was responsible for a complete design of the product, where I conducted user research, created user persona, user journey and workflow, designed wireframes and complete visual look of the product.
I designed a web-based planning platform. I executed journeys, wireframes, and design specs required for platform.
I designed and presented my works to gain buy-in from executives, senior stakeholders and many other teams throughout the project life cycle.
I partnered with the different people to uncover insights and translate concepts into features that address customer behaviors and motivations.
In just 3 years, since 2017, company has gathered a huge round of applause for there flagship product "syncops" a realtime project management tool for industries. By this time they were already working with great industry players like Reliance, Indian oil, Tata Steel and many more. But till then syncops were just focused on the execution phase of the project. That means still planning was done in traditional legacy software like primavera, MS project, etc. To become an industry leader company has to extend its present platform to the planning stage.
My task was to layout a planning platform that might combine with syncops to make it a complete bundle for commercial use. The very last product ought to be having
My lack of domain knowledge in the project planning process meant I need to understand the planning process and its use in the execution phase thoroughly and quickly. I approached all aspects of the project collaboratively and spent most of my time with an experienced planner understanding the process, discussing the challenges with the project manager and took some of the project management courses.
I ran a gaggle of meetings and workshops with the planner to know the details of planning process. This helped me to understand the challenges with the conventional plan making techniques.
To hold me privy to the enterprise-standard terms and to have an universal information of undertaking management I took a web path recommended by my mission supervisor. This helped me to speak with greater efficacy for the duration of meetings with different stakeholders and make better sense of the dialogue.
The discovery phase was a quick, high-intensity effort that allowed us to audit the existing work, review the competitor's landscape, define project milestones, understanding our client's vision and begin the research.
The user research was not like conventional research process. Due to contractual regulations and tight project schedule, it became now, not viable to go to the field and engage with the users to understand their behavior and pain factors. I tackled this problem by outlining consumer archetypes developing proto personas and end to end journey maps from the preceding understanding of the sector. This was then verified and discussed with the experts and project managers until they were glad about it.
My research reviled that there are more than one archetypes, among which the complete plan making procedure runs around. One of them is a planner and others are seniors employees who might be in direct touch with the planner until the plan is completed. These humans played with a huge amount of information in paper format and used a conventional communication techniques which were inefficient.
My proto-personas consisted of 2 archetypes which I used to facilitate discussion about user needs during the complete life cycle of the project.
From the studies, I recognized that our users weren't always especially knowledgeable men working underneath big stress conditions. Also, they were used to the traditional software used form many years. Therefore if the visualized product has to stand out and attract the user it should be,
Our vision was to create a collaborative platform that allows the planner to utilize the data from the previously created plans and refine them over time to reach ultimate efficiency. With the power of the web platform, we envisioned a faster and more efficient collaboration between a planner, project managers, and other stakeholders in the industry structure.
Before starting with design work, I spent a great deal of time making sense of workflow and understanding the role of each person in the workflow. Mapping out the workflow was more challenging as it involved many touch points with many different people. I had many iterations before getting to the final one with help of my project manager.
Once the content and all the sections of the product were finalized, I proceed with further design work.
Before jumping to the digital medium I preferred low-fidelity wire-frames for this project because it helped me to test my ideas rapidly in collaboration with my other team members. This helped us to explore every possible solution and get feedback at the same time rapidly. This set the direction for the next phase of the design where I took this ideas to a digital high fidelity wire-frames.
After exploring thoughts on paper, I decided to go for high fidelity wire-frames before immediately devoting my time to excessive fidelity design. I used this to communicate the preliminary concept to the experts and planners and get their comments. I used digital wire-frames in the place of paper one because it was easier for non-designers to make the experience of the work and to provide severe comments on it.
The company already had a design language for their flagship product. But they wanted me to explore new ideas. I took a challenge and came up with a presentation that I presented to the stakeholder and got approved before using them in my final design.
To move forward with the design I used the sketch to create sets of detailed mock-ups. This approach was beneficial in showing stakeholders, design progress and helped them to visualize the product in front of their
own eye.
Planning snippet is a web-based tool that assists project planners to collaborate with the other senior employees directly during the project planning process in refineries. The planner can share the project instantly with different employees and get the feedback in no time. It helps senior employees to have direct collaboration with a planners to create a more effective plan for better execution.
The final product has a clean and user-friendly work-space which would help them in working more efficiently. The product helps in faster plan creation with the help of data from the previously made plan, making it more refined and efficient plan each time.
Very little time and a lot to do was my primary concern for the summer of 2019. My project with planning snippet team, participating in business meetings, borrowing 30 minutes of the time of many brilliant designers and making friends with other interns! But every bit of those busy twelve weeks has been extremely rewarding.
A college project is a design student, working under the guidance of a design professor and also taking regular feedback from classmates and seniors. It is not the most eclectic of viewpoints, to be honest. However, through the project that I worked on at Maximl, I got a chance to collaborate with designers and product managers and engineers. Each of them had a different and valuable viewpoint of looking at a product — discussions with them made me more sensitive to their point of view to eventually make a better end product.
The internship was an amazing experience where I got to learn a lot from the work and the people. I think the most important takeaways from the internship was learning how to document, communicate and collaborate effectively.
“The experience of working with Ganesh in building the product was excellent. He has handled the complete design for the product by himself and has done a good job. He has also shown high commitment and work ethics. His design skills have improved a lot through the project and the same was appreciated by the entire team”
- Product Manager, Maximl
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