DESIGN & RESEARCH

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DESIGN & RESEARCH ✦

CONFIDENCE PLUS in vermeerone™ ui concept

The Industrial Design group was approached by Warranty to help facilitate research on how customers and dealers perceive our warranty offerings. At the time, there was a relatively low “attachment rate” (i.e., the rate of customers adding ConfidencePlus when purchasing equipment), and there was enthusiasm to increase the attachment rate and drive overall sales.

We found that there was a lack of consensus on what Confidence Plus was and what the plans cover. A major pain point surrounding warranty is the lack of clear information about the offerings. Sales employees struggle to show the value of Confidence Plus to customers.

These concepts show how Confidence Plus offerings can be injected into the customer journey within VermeerOne™ in order to assist with improving the overall process when purchasing Confidence Plus and enjoying its benefits after attaching warranty to machines.

Boreplan: as-built video concept testing

Vermeer wanted to build and include an "easy button” as-built plotter feature within the paid BorePlan app in Q1 of 2024. This feature keeps in mind the users whose jobs it is to arrive at finished drill jobsites to record the actual (versus planned) points along the drilled line. The research allowed us to validate user desires and needs for an “easy button” to plot as-built lines by qualitative video concept testing. We supplemented concept testing with additional user interviews to uncover user opinions/behaviors toward adapting their processes to include a digital tool like BorePlan to report as-built lines to get paid faster.

VERMEER ONE PRODUCTIVITY METRICS RESEARCH

Opportunity

Vermeer's focus for Vermeer One in Q3 of 2023 was building out the customer dashboard. One of the new features included telematics data, which included productivity metrics. Since there was time before the feature was built, some discovery work was done to uncover how value could be added to the productivity metrics.

Assumptions

  • Customers were unaware of the tools Vermeer provided to keep fleets running independently.

  • There was a disconnect on the actual user - Owner (customer) awareness vs. field operator needs.

  • Mid-large tier customers needed an increase in data awareness.

  • Unless customers used Caterpillar or John Deere software, they might have used something simple like Excel or nothing at all to track productivity.

  • The dealers/customer (managers) were working in the office with an internet connection and less onsite with mobile.

What We Wanted to LearN

Data

  • What data was most important for customers beyond basic fuel and input/output metrics?

  • What data were they currently using?

  • What features, if any, on the dealership side could be valuable to customers?

  • Were there productivity markers we could give them over time that would help determine job site efficiencies?

  • What were the metrics customers were using to base on equipment usage?

  • What were the data/metrics customers were using to put bids out for jobs? What did they use to adjust their bid?

Customer Process

  • Where were the pain points in their processes?

  • What were the use cases for mobile? Specifically, from users on job sites where mobile access could benefit their workflow (i.e., Operators, Foremans or Mechanics)

PAST VOICE-TO-PICK TOOL

An existing internal product that inventory coordinators on the manufacturing floor uses needed an improvement in ease-of-use. There are six input fields used to generate a “pick list” that is printed and sent to a picker, who gathers parts from the list for assembly. This product was using dated UI and had room for improvement in terms of number of clicks or friction. Understanding how the input fields correlate to one another was challenging, but required to find opportunities to condense fields together.

NEW VOICE-TO-PICK TOOL

The “CCN” and “Mas Loc” fields both specified parts of a location, similar to how “State” and “City” do, and combining the two fields into a “Location” field, allowing users to enter a location in plain English (e.g., 'Pella Plant 7'). I believe this to be easier than finding a location with two sets of numerical values.

“Like” Search and “WO Number(s)” fields in the old design were related. “Like” Search allowed users to type in a prefix such as “PD” (Pile Driver), which then populated the “WO Number(s)” dropdown with all possible machine options from the Pile Driver product line. I combined them into one field, where a user could begin typing “PD” and the field would act as a smart search, rather than separating these into two fields.

After performing a contextual inquiry with our inventory coordinators on the manufacturing floor, I learned the last two fields, “WO Line” and “Analysis Code” were automatically filled and hardly edited by our users. I created a condensed interface design for my Product Manager that hid those two fields under an 'Advanced options' button to reduce clutter. I’ve included versions, as shown in tablet and mobile versions in this example, that do not hide those two values.

I consulted the broader UX group at Vermeer to update the UI so that it matched the current standards and used components from our design library.