JewelSuite

Imagine having to make the final decision to drill a new well the costs of which can easily run into milions of dollars. Do you flip a coin? Probably not. This is exactly the reason why Jewelsuite exists. It allows multidisciplinary teams to analyse the subsurface and reproduce it as virtual models so that you can try out different development options as well as predict how much profit you can stand to make and what the risks are.

This software is used by oil and gas companies such as Shell who is developing it in a joint venture with Baker Hughes, a GE Company. There's a lot at stake here and lots of different people involved. Getting this right ensures we can produce the energy we need to run our societies in a safe and responsible manner. As such UX design is a key aspect in the creation of this software.

My Job

Interaction and visual design for new workflows together with 12 scrum teams

Managing and ensuring a consistent set of controls

Creating and maintaining a consistent icon set

Collaborate with subject matter experts and management to ensure a clear vision

Perform user research, capture that in UX deliverables and ensure it gets incorporated in the final product

Challenge

Easily the biggest challenge in this project is to be able to quickly internalize knowledge and information from experienced subject matter experts that can have upwards of 20 years of experience. This requires me to focus on whats truly critical for me to know to be able to build a solution for them and that which is best left to them.

While we also make a lot of new functionality a large portion of my work on this project is dealing with legacy functionality that is sometimes several years old with none of the people working on it working for the company anymore and turning it around and making it useful and powerful once again.

One of the personas i created for the project to better understand the target audience and get everyone on the same page.

Results

The inspector panel pictured below is one of the older bits of the application. It allows you to change a variety of settings for your selected object. There's lots of useful stuff in there but a lot of people dont know that it is in there and if they do it is hard to find. To fix this issue I went through all the settings for all of the objects and together with our subject matter experts decided which ones we wanted to keep and which could go. Then I organised all the settings into clear groups and gave each setting an appropriate control. I made sure to be aware of the alignment of elements as well as keep in mind gestallt laws to ensure the new inspector panel easy to oversea and a joy to use! The feedback from our users was excellent and they were really impressed with the clarity the new panel provides.