Overview

Enlighten Robotics’s founders started putting their experience in robotics with the help of few scientists to do their part in fighting Covid-19. Their robots are equipped with UVC light that would kill 99.9% of the pathogens on any surfaces. I was part of the team that built them a command center dashboard to control the robots automatically and generate reports for finished jobs.

Team-3 UX designers I Time-3 week sprint, August 2020

Getting to know our robots & business

By conducting a couple of client meetings we got to understand their business and goals better. Here are the highlighted insights:

• The disinfection process takes a few minutes depending on the previously calculated UVC dosage.

• An operator controls multiple robots consecutively (1-4 robots)

• Fully autonomous robots is one of their future goals. 

• An operator/ manager should be able to generate reports showing collected data during the process.

Main goal to navigate multiple robots remotely

From our business analysis and client’s meetings, we were able to have two main tasks that our new product would focus on other than following the design standard for a dashboard:

1- Switch easily between controlling multiple robots at once during a disinfection process.

2- Generate data/ report showing performance and analysis from robots’ collected data.

Where to start - Design standard for each task

We conducted secondary research & comparative analysis to understand how such a dashboard should work and what to show on it.

• What metrics should be shown for robots/ fleets?

• What pages should an operator navigate between them?

• What job information should be included?

• What are the standard navigation/ information for remotely controlling a robot?

• What data should be collected/ reviewed by the operator?

Understanding robots metrics and data

Two examples for a comparative analysis for a cleaning robot dashboard showing required information and data

Example of a Building Management System (BMS) dashboard that controls diff. mechanical & electrical systems in a building

This’s a good example of how a dashboard can pinpoint different data entries on the floor plan for the facility to make it easier for the user to connect the date they’re reading - it’s also showing how data can be presented through tables which will also help when generating reports

Our eureka 

Having all those findings and analysis we’ve determined that if Enlighten Robotics has its own platform that:

• Facilitates controlling the robots remotely by adding more visual aids such as way-finding feature (facility’s floor plan)

• Clear/ easy way to switch control between different robots

• Shows live progress for the disinfection process completion

• Shows necessary data for an operator (battery life, location on the floor plan, predetermined paths to follow if available)

• Collects data from robots/ fleets to analyze and generate reports

Then they would be able to reach their goals and complete the disinfection processes in the most efficient way.

What to show on the dashboard?

Deciding on the Information Architecture 

Breaking out all the different features an operator wants to have on the dashboard helped us group such features together and determine how our dashboard navigation and architecture would be. Also from analyzing the current platform and our insights from the comparative analysis, we’ve concluded to have 2 main pages other than the home screen (Fleet - Job) pages.

We’ve assigned all the tasks & data input we’ve decided on to a page:

1- Fleet page:

• Fleets/ robots stats

  • Overall fleet stats

  • Specific fleet stats

  • Specific robot stats

• Battery life/ charging

• Errors detected

• Online status

• Disinfection validation percentage

• Scheduled maintenance 

Getting to the user’s happy path

By knowing our user’s goals we were able to focus on a couple of tasks to begin with and determine the optimum path/ sequence an operator would go through

1- For an operator to be able to select a certain job to start and complete the disinfection process by controlling multiple robots throughout the facility 

2- For a superuser (has access to all data & information for all the fleets/ robots) or an operator to be able to check data collected from certain fleet/ robot and generate reports based on it

First draft (low/mid-fid)

Since this will be mainly for Enlighten Robotics operators while at work, we only focused on the desktop version.

We had a design studio to come up with the general concept we’ll be moving forward with before getting into the details for each part.

From those sketches, we developed it to have our low/mid-fidelity wireframes

1- Users log in, navigates to find the assigned job they need to finish. They then review the job’s general info and move onto the disinfection process where they’ll be controlling the robots. Once that’s done they’ll be able to see a confirmation page showing all the data they need for the completed job.

2- A superuser or an operator have the ability to review the status of a certain fleet/ robot and pull data that was collected from previous jobs to review and generate reports if needed

 Feedback...feedback...feedback

Usability tests

We were able to conduct our usability tests using the prototype we created using these mid-fidelity wireframes.

Objective:

• We wanted to know if users would be able to understand how to navigate the dashboard to finish the task they want.

• We also wanted to see if users are able to switch between controlling different robots during the disinfection process

• Are users able to find the information they want for a specific fleet/ robot?

We conducted 4 usability tests. All were done via zoom video call giving the current pandemic.

Insights:

Some of the main insights we got:

• The “add a job” feature for the calendar on the job’s page was confusing

• Switching between robots during a disinfection process was not clear enough

• Ending the disinfection process wasn’t clear

Client’s feedback

We also presented this prototype to the client and got some feedback and requests from them:

• Add the “talk to custodial staff” feature on the jobs/ control pages

• Indicating that all processes are being recorded

• Having the option for a robot to follow a specific determined path autonomously (future development but they wanted to have the feature now)

Iterations & branding

We used all the insights we got and iterated our design to be more user friendly and easier.We then bumped our wireframes to hi-fidelity and had a final prototype of it

What next?!

The tools we introduced are simply the basic tools that Enlighten Robotics would need, but there’s room for more. Here are some of the next steps we’ve highlighted for future development:

• Adding a mapping feature for new customers (where the robot familirises itself with the environment and builds the floor plans shown on the prototype pages) this only needs to be done once for each new customer 

• Building the calendar feature & adding a recurring job on it

• Building the communication feature with the custodial staff

Personal reflections

I was blessed to have amazing teammates and a great client who tried to help by answering as many questions as they could.

Creating a dashboard for such a unique purpose and business model was a challenge given that they’re still testing the product and wanted this platform to better sell and raise funds, also the fact that they’re in a relatively new field with limited information available and almost no competitors didn’t make it any easier. But i’ve learned a lot and practiced how to overcome new challenges and propose a totally new product