Emerson

Evidence

Stakeholder alignment (starting point): The project began with the EMEA product head and the Logbook PMM, who flagged this as an urgent client-facing problem by establishing why this mattered before any design work started.

Heuristic audit: An audit against Nielsen's heuristics surfaced multiple violations in the existing Logbook by informing what to specifically probe for in user research rather than going in blind.

User interviews (6 operators/supervisors): Interviews focused on how operators actually use the Logbook day-to-day, what they need from it, and where it breaks down. Four consistent pain points emerged:

• Shift timings were hard to locate

• Graphs/data presentation lacked credibility

• Limited access to past observations

• Poor visibility into task information

Approach

A full IA overhaul was on the table but rejected deliberately: rebuilding the information architecture from scratch would have increased cognitive load and retraining costs for an existing, trained user base.
It's not an acceptable tradeoff for an industrial tool operators rely on under time pressure. Instead, the design optimized for:

• Familiarity

• Scannability

• Faster decision-making

• Reduced cognitive load

• Better hierarchy

• Better accessibility

This constraint shaped every subsequent design decision and the goal wasn't a "wow" redesign, it was removing friction from an existing mental model operators already trusted.

Validation

Tested with 16 participants against a structured testing script covering every core task in the redesigned flow: task by task, not just a general walkthrough.
This surfaced concrete, actionable feedback that fed directly back into design refinements before launch.

Results

Shipped on time, with:

• 70% surge in dashboard engagement

• 95%+ of users reporting the Logbook was significantly easier to access