Designing a collaboration application for Sense Intellifield/Technology with use of contextual design

Abstract

Sense Technology and its branch company Sense Intellifield delivers integrated automation and information systems for the oil industry, marine and other industries. Now they are working on a project called IMEX, which is a communication system for the oil industry, to ensure better ways of communication between the offshore rigs and onshore support centers. We used the method contextual design to get the needed data to design the prototype for our IMEX system. This method is based on going to the users’ work place and observing them while they are working. The data obtained here is used to create work models, which is used to get a structured representation of the work practice. The models are redesigned to show the new proposed work practice, before we started to design the prototype. We had good experiences and results from using contextual design. The results from contextual design were used as the basis for the prototype development. The first draft of the prototype was based on this together with the emphasis on keeping the existing design to make the system feel familiar. The draft was discussed with the development team at Sense and the feedback here was used to design the second draft. We also had a discussion with Sense about the second draft before we went to test the prototype with the real users in the oil industry. The prototype was well received from both the real users and the developers, with regards to usability and flexibility, and made a good basis for discussion for further work. It’s not a complete solution, since this is a big system and to comprehensive to implement everything. The prototype is a suggested design with focus on four selected modules, which we found to be the most interesting.