Autodesk

Overview

Autodesk acquired PlanGrid in 2018, but it still continues providing cloud-based solutions to increase productivity in the construction industry.

I was a product design intern on Field Reports, a tool for users to create, submit, and review construction reports.

I spent 6 weeks working with a product manager, designers, researchers, and developers to examine form creation process and design a custom form builder feature.

My research and design initiatives provided a foundation for the team to successfully launched the feature in early 2020.

Context

Because construction work is complex and high-risk, documentation of processes and progress is crucial. There are many types of forms, but Daily Report is the most used ones.

Daily Report provides details of daily activities & events at a worksite. It contains information such as

• weather condition
• work log
• equipment & material
• visitor records

Current Field Reports

PlanGrid offers 2 ways to create reports — using a built-in daily report feature or upload your own PDF report.

The Problem
Many users reported that the current tool wasn't flexible to use. They wanted to create custom forms directly on PlanGrid rather than having to upload PDFs.

Research

Syncing with the product manager helped me grasp a big picture of the, but I still didn’t have enough details to solve the problem.

The main research goal was to understand sequences of tasks & tools used to create forms. We also wanted to find out the satisfaction level & pain points of the current process.

Recruiting Participants
I worked with Kim, a research intern, to recruit 10 companies (small, medium, large-sized & government-based) to participate in the user research.

Research Methods
I adopted a user-centered design method of contextual inquiry to reveal the underlying work structure of the form creation process.

I also applied a master-apprentice model, where the users (experts) walked me (a novice) through the form creation process step by step.

Learning #1
Overall, users weren't satisfied with the current PlanGrid tools.
Limited customizability, inefficient & lengthy processes, and lack of data aggregation were the main frustration points.

Learning #2
Typically, project manager, project engineer, and IT Admin were the ones that created forms. Types of form included:

• Paper forms
• Microsoft Excel forms
• PDF forms
• PlanGrid Native forms

Designing &
Concept Testing

With learnings and findings from user research, I explored potential designs and prototyped 3 different concepts. I demonstrated these concepts to the same user groups and gather feedback from them.

Note – these concepts were low-fidelity as they meant to provide users rough ideas of what the new potential custom form builder could look like.

Concept Testing/
Conclusion

Overall, users found concept #2 (Item-by-item) to suit their needs the most. The design of concept #2 provided customizability while also allowed the users to manage the layout of the template.

Many users liked the idea of using the keyboard to quickly enter questions in concept #1 (Condensed view). While they found the concept to be convenient and efficient, all of them mentioned the importance of organizing the form layout. Therefore, this concept wouldn't meet their needs.

Users found concept #3 (Smart PDF) to be cool, but it didn't seem to solve their pain points. The concept still required PDF files to be created separately and the users also needed to manually draw each text field after uploading the PDF to PlanGrid. This concept would also require excessive development effort, making it the least feasible and desirable.

Final Design

From the above conclusion, concept #2 was chosen as a final design. I revised the prototype and made it a high-fidelity prototype.

It should be noted that these designs aren't production version. I wrapped up this project during my last week of internship, so another designer completed the final design of this feature after I left.