RailConnect™ Service Planner
The all-in-one scheduling tool for railroad superintendents.
UX RESEARCH / UX DESIGN
Railroad companies need to optimize crew utilization to remain competitive with other transportation industries. The existing process to map out routes and work tasks relied on extensive industry knowledge and manual input. My goal was to address this need by designing a tool that would allow railroads to quickly and effectively schedule their fleet.
ROLE
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
User Testing
Design Audit
DURATION
October 2020 - May 2021
TEAM
1 Designer (Me)
1 UX Researcher
1 Product Manager
10 Developers
TOOLS
Figma
Whiteboard
Adobe Creative Suite
Zeplin
Miro
Problem
Too much effort, too little value.
A railroad crew member needs to know two things to perform their job:
1) Where they are going and;
2) What equipment needs to move.
Crew plans are created by railroad superintendents (a.k.a. "Trainmasters").
The current planning software requires so much effort opt to skip the software planning function entirely. Instead, trainmasters would leverage their expertise to know the name of every station and customer then manually check for errors.
We needed to create a scalable solution that would let a user easily create, visualize, and validate a route and tasks to save the user time and improve customer satisfaction.
Constraints
Design System - Limited to company's themed Google Material design system's component library.
Offshore Development Team - Added layer of complexity in communication and sprint planning.
Research
Our team leveraged the knowledge from previous projects to develop the persona for this project. This persona was then validated by internal subject matter experts and user interviews by several clients.
Trainmaster persona developed from subject matter experts and prior research.
The persona provided a clear direction as we sought out to simplify the trainmaster's planning tasks. Before embarking on the project, we conducted an internal workshop with sales, marketing, and product teams to determine the strategy for the project.
Outputs gathered during a virtual workshop conducted on Miro.
The workshop aligned the internal teams with the following mission statement:
"The purpose of Service planner is to simplify the scheduling process which will benefit trainmasters because the current system is not user-friendly and lacks many features required by a scheduling tool. By defining new workflows, we can solve the trainmaster's problem and measure our success by comparing workflow completion times and customer satisfaction."
Synthesis
From the data gathered during initial discovery,