CERN | Data Aggregation Application
UX Design/ Product Management
The LHC and its Injectors are underlying an overall lifecycle with constantly changing experiments, upgrades and maintenance works. Those interventions require a high level of coordination and communication to be orchestrated.
The various parties coordinating these interventions each had their own overview of the documentation progress and what needed to be done. This leads to duplication of effort, is prone to errors, and appeared intransparent, among other things. The goal of the project was to create an information hub where the various parties could update each other, comment, discuss, distribute tasks, create to-do lists, and link project-related documents.
A series of interviews and observations were conducted for a good understanding about the user. Knowledge of the current workflow, the weaknesses and advantages of the user's current process and intelligent workarounds are all very valuable sources of information that ensure a high quality of the final product.
To better illustrate to the user how we envisioned the project, and to ensure issues were properly understood, a lo-fi prototype was created and printed on paper. Being able to show early prototypes to the user simplifies discussions, ensures there is a shared vision of what comes next, and makes new customizations easy.
A few iterations later, a high-fidelity interactive prototype could be created. With a first concrete prototype that feels real to the user, further observation and testing can be done. This ensures a solid concept before going into production.
The backlog was filled with tasks, an architecture was agreed upon, and manpower was provided. A working version of Track It could thus be created. Version 1.0 is never the end of a software's journey, and it is the critical moment when fiction and reality collide. However, through solid research and communication in earlier stages, we managed to meet expectations and even went beyond them in some aspects.
Future versions of Track It are still being created today, and I'm proud to have been a part of it!
The tool was featured at the 9th International Particle Accelerator Conference in 2018. The article and poster can be viewed by clicking on the following links:
"... I was particularly impressed by the work autonomy and pro-activity demonstrated by Mr. Rauser. He showed being able to tackle complex tasks, such as understanding and documenting interactions between many technical trades and teams, all targeted at the LHC machine. With a minimalistic guidance, thrown into a field that was brand new to him, he went on meeting the various stakeholders and came back with some very valuable input and ideas ..."
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