Designers
f209 GmbH | Sascha Wahlbrink, Florian Jörgensen
Year
2020
Category
Product
Country
Germany
Three questions to the project team
1. What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
A modern production plant is so complex that the average factory worker can no longer keep track of it. Although the sophisticated algorithms are capable of doing this, they are themselves so complex that they can no longer be interpreted by the workforce. This also affects the confidence of the factory staff in the algorithms. The challenge was therefore to prepare the information in the app in such a way that it supports the factory workers without overburdening them and to build up trust in the digital assistant in the long term.
2. What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
Our high point was during a user interview: The head of development of a large production plant manufacturer was enthusiastic about the UX of the application. He could never have imagined that such complex software could be so easy to handle. Our personal Aha! Moment was during the shadowing of selected factory workers in the production plant of a development partner. We could only really understand the constant stimulus satiation and excessive demands on the operating personnel when we experienced the situation ourselves on the factory floor. The low point was when there was no adequate front-end development in parts of the project phase, which affected the quality of the user experience.
3. Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
In cooperation with plus10 and the Fraunhofer Institute, we have submitted an application for funding for a research project that will specifically address the explainability of artificial intelligence. The goal is to adapt the knowledge gained so far in the project to the latest, even more complex deep-learning algorithms and to find a generalistic approach to explain the phenomenon. This approach will then be applied in the further development of the product. We see the product as an engine to increase the acceptance of AI, especially in production and also in the general population.
