PSO 3.0 is a digital experience for engineers in the oil and gas industry to perform well health inspection and network optimization, which was also a significant project during my time at Xecta. As an interaction designer, my role is to highlight the user experience of PSO 3.0 so that users can complete their daily tasks more relaxed and positive. Along the way, I work closely with stakeholders, program managers, and developers to understand business goals and identify usability issues, designing the product from user research to mockups.

DURATIONFeb 2022 - May 2022

TEAMStephen Blevins (Design Director),
Haowen Liu (Product Designer)

ROLEUser Research, Wire-framing,  
Interface Design, Prototyping

TOOLSMiro, 
Figma

Due to the complex data and huge oil well models in the oil and gas industry, engineers need to use different tools to inspect, optimize and adjust oil wells every day, which undoubtedly makes the engineer's work cumbersome. PSO helps users automate workflow from the well health detection to deeper level analysis. In the previous two versions, PSO mainly focused on the research and development of back-end technology. So starting from PSO 3.0, we decided to revolutionize the user experience of the entire product.

"YouTube" Approach to Energy Exploration

Once enter PSO 3.0, users can review oil wells just like watching videos, gaining insights and understanding the details of each site through engaging well info card.

Check Oil Wells Summary Like Reading News

After click into a well info card, user can read concise and informative updates on "pro summary" in an easy-to-digest format.

Increase Impact

After redeeming the GiveCard, users can choose to increase the donation amount for the same charity or buy more GiveCards to give to others.

Precision and Modernity in Data Visualization

PSO 3.0 combines cutting-edge technology with precise data representation, offering user a modern solution for oil&gas data monitoring.

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Challenge

1. Data availability: Ensuring the accuracy of the data and understanding the different data priorities becomes an important part of this process.

2. Disparate sources: Integrating different tools and data sources that users currently use into the same platform became a difficulty.

3. Learning tools: Users are satisfied and comfortable with the tool they are using, and they need to reduce the learning time for a new tool significantly

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Goal

- Create an easy-to-use and reliable system.

- Incorporate more automation into products.

- Create unique workflows for different user personas.

- Improve user experience based on the original software model.

- Improve the UI design of the previous version.

- Make it the primary tool for users to do their day-to-day work.
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Stakeholder Synthesis

We started with user interviews, during which we learned about user through a series of questions. Then, we recorded and summarized the user's story in the sticky notes on the Miro board.

Affinity Mapping

To further understand and summarize users' behaviors and needs, we use the Affinity Mapping approach to convert users' answers into insights and prioritize them.

User Persona

According to the research of the first two steps, we generalize the user persona into the following two types.

Existing Flow Analysis

Through the user's product walkthrough sessions, we learned about the technology and processes users use today. Then, we transformed this process into a flowchart and gave a high-level overview of the user's primary behavior. At the same time, we also analyzed all the current company technologies and converted them into flowcharts in the same way.