Instructions in your pocket

One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is when I get to try new technology together with users in the Volvo Group business. The chance to really get to know a part of our business and at the same time help the colleagues in that business take advantage of new technology to improve some aspect of their day-to-day job is exciting!

My latest prototype was executed out in the workshop together with service technicians from Volvo Trucks in Sweden and China. The basic idea was to see if we might further increase quality in the services performed by the technicians if they had easy access to real-time information on a mobile device. The ideation and development was done in cooperation with Volvo Parts.

Questions that we wanted to evaluate during the prototype were:
- Is it possible to use a consumer product, like a smartphone, in the tough environment of a workshop?
- What is the perception of usability and access to the information?
- Can we use animations rather than text or in combination with text and images?

The feedback from the tests has been very positive and I hope that this technology will soon help our technicians to deliver up-time to our customers!

Related articles
Blog Shortlink

The future of lifestreaming

Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group has put together a brief video clip that explores the future of lifestreaming. There are some unique interactive visualizations in the style of Minority Report, exploring concepts such as “the magnetism of data,” “location awareness across time” and the “serendipity of discovery.” Very interesting stuff.

Blog Shortlink

Making sense of all that data

For some time now the automotive industry has developed technology which allows for gathering of data from any vehicle remotely. All this data provides a fantastic opportunity to understand how vehicles are used and what problems occur so that quality, durability and safety can be improved. Not all vehicles are equipped with these “telematics” technologies today, but they will for sure be in the future.

Up until now the challenge has been to make it all work and develop the technology, now we face a completely different challenge – what to do with all that data! Humans are not very good at dealing with information clutter, but we are quite good at handling images.

The trick is of course to create images or views that reveals interesting facts and relationships. David McCandless did a fascinating presentation at TED talks on “The beauty of data visualization“, a real eye opener to me ;-)

Blog Shortlink

Prototyping the Visual & Social process of the future

How can we create a virtual room in which people meet to discuss, collaborate and express their views on what is needed to drive the business forward? How can we find ways to aggregate data from different connected activities and present this in an understandable way? This is what I together with my prototype partners am exploring right now.  The main challenge is to create a virtual “coffee room” and adding “war room” features in a rich user experience format. The focus is on rich internet application but also trying to find new methods to display connected data.  The aim is to find a new “state of the art” method and combine that method with a rich user experience. We believe that this will add business value in terms of improved decision quality and speed in execution.

Some examples of innovative visualizations that connect the dots and presents complex data in a understandable way. 
 

 

Microsoft Pivot: 

http://www.getpivot.com/

If you have any ideas for methods and technologies that can help us bring order in chaos and improve that user experience please comment! 

Blog Shortlink

Bad Behavior has blocked 747 access attempts in the last 7 days.