And what to do about it
Key Takeaways
Current design standards mean industrial software is feature-rich but not user-friendly.
When industrial organizations prioritize employee experience, usability and adoption improve.
When adoption of intelligent products is high, organizations increase the frequency of optimal outcomes.
Picture this: it’s shift change at a factory, and there was unplanned downtime overnight. Workers on the dayshift have extra pressure on them as they try to not only match normal delivery patterns and rates but also look for ways to minimize any further mechanical downtime and make sure production quality rates are high.
Here’s the crucial question: does the dashboard that the shift manager uses to track production quality also track catch-up metrics? Does the display respond to accommodate non-ideal circumstances? Or will the shift manager have to find some other, manual way to compare their shift’s output to what's actually needed, given the recent outage?
Just as important: will the shift manager be able to pay attention to this dashboard as well as all the other apps they’re using? Will they be able to share updates with workers in a way that’s motivating rather than stressful? Will workers be able to see updates if they’re wearing safety goggles? Hear them over factory noise?
These are the kinds of questions that highlight the design crisis in industrial software. Too often, industrial solutions are designed with a human-computer interaction mindset rather than the user-centered design mindset typical of contemporary consumer software.
The result? Workers are overwhelmed. They’re being asked to use a dozen apps by people who haven’t spent any time on the factory floor. Problems take hours to resolve and require input from multiple people. Seventy-two percent say better technology would make them feel more invested in the business—and yet, when manufacturers do invest in custom software it’s often under-used and so under-performs relative to its cost.
So how can modern industrial leaders break the cycle? It starts with understanding how human-centered design can lead you to better software that drives higher adoption and so delivers stronger ROI. Let’s take a look at how you can do that.
Related: Manufacturing's digital moment: key takeaways from Connected Worker Manufacturing Forum
Industrial software is often created with the assumption that it’s a functional tool measured by features and technical capabilities. But progressive manufacturers are realizing that if employees don’t use a piece of software, it won’t deliver any benefit.
In other words, without employee adoption, there can be no transformation—regardless of how sophisticated a product or program is.
So creating software that employees want to use becomes a core facet of product strategy.
To understand why this is so effective, consider “desire paths,” those muddy walkways you often see as shortcuts between paved sidewalks. Desire paths happen when people ignore the “official” route and instead create one that’s more efficient.
In industrial contexts, a desire path might look like workers…
Entering low-value data in form fields meant to capture why an error happened.
Clicking OKAY over and over again to get through a sequence in the software rather than filling in the details.
Texting a shift lead rather than using a connected worker app for escalation or handoff.
Batching tasks to make work “feel smoother” rather than doing real-time tracking or one-piece flow, as systems encourage.
The fix, though, is not in banning “desire paths” but rather in understanding what they teach us.
When industrial leaders create software that follows human-centered design principles, they get products that are intuitive, helpful, and friction reducing. When frontline worker experience is a key design consideration, the resulting products are optimized for gloved hands or multilingual support or haptic feedback. They enjoy faster user adoption and drive sustainable transformation because they are the path of least resistance.
It makes sense in theory, right? Involve end users in design, and you’ll build something that works better for them. Now let’s take a look at what that looks like in practice.
Let’s return to that dashboard. We’ll assume it was built at the request of executive leadership: they love their dashboards, they’d heard shift managers wanted better visibility into worker output, and so they had a dashboard built.
What's wrong with that approach?
For one thing, it doesn’t involve any input from end users.
For another, it assumes the solution before adequately exploring the problem.
A human-centered design approach would go a bit differently:
User research: The software team would first conduct ethnographic studies on your factory floor to understand actual workflows, pain points, and how workers really interact with systems. I.e., you’d aim to better understand the problem and its context before developing a solution.
Experience design: Regardless of what the specific solution is, the team would optimize its interfaces for its industrial context. That means they’d build something that would work for the people actually using it, whether they’re wearing PPE, more comfortable in a language other than English, operating in a high-cognitive-load environment, etc.
Usability testing: As the team develops prototypes, it would share them with real end users, getting their feedback and adapting the software to simplify workflows or address edge cases that hadn’t been anticipated. The product wouldn’t be considered ready until the experience was good enough for the product to exceed adoption thresholds.
Design systems: In addition to developing the tool you need now, the team would create a comprehensive design framework to ensure consistency across applications. This allows for rapid deployment (and adoption) of new features.
If you approached the shift manager’s initial problem with this framework, maybe you would discover that a dashboard isn’t the right solution after all. Maybe a better solution is a digital twin of the factory floor that lets the shift manager see where backlogs are happening in real time.
Or maybe the best solution is simply rearranging work stations.
Maybe it’s additional training for the manager.
These solutions are vastly different and require vastly different investments and inputs. That’s why it’s so important to understand the context of the problem before building a solution and to understand the perspective of the people involved as you build that solution.
Let’s zoom out a bit. We’ve talked about how to develop industrial software that drives adoption and transformation.
Now let’s consider how you can gauge the success of an intelligent product you’ve built. Here are some general rules of thumb about how intelligent products like industrial software should function in the larger context of an industrial organization:
Intelligent products should increase the frequency of optimal outcomes. They can do that by building in institutional knowledge, winning the trust of end users, and functioning well in their intended context.
Intelligent products should fuel transformation. They can do that by fundamentally changing how work gets done. This is possible only when adoption is high, which is possible only when products work for their intended users.
Employee experience with intelligent products will determine transformation success more than technical sophistication. This is the adoption component: when intelligent products make life easier for front-line workers, workers use those tools. At scale, that drives transformation.
Industrial leaders understand that the industry needs to modernize to not only keep pace with competitors but also to attract and retain the next generation of workers.
The savviest leaders also recognize that those workers are the lifeblood of transformation. While intelligent products will continue to facilitate the industry’s transformation and modernization, it’s the people who use those products who will be the drivers of that transformation.
The organizations that recognize this reality and develop software accordingly will lead the industry in the years to come.
Jason Hehman is Industrials vertical lead at TXI, a boutique agency whose core competency is designing digital products that people love using—exactly what industrial software lacks. Jason and the TXI team bring consumer-grade design thinking to manufacturing environments, creating interfaces frontline workers find intuitive, helpful, and preferable to manual alternatives. The result: technology adoption isn't mandated but voluntary because the digital experience genuinely improves how work gets done.
Published by Jason Hehman in Product Innovation
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