WAVE
Wave is the ultimate safety solution for construction sites, combining wearable devices and digital services. Wave app encompasses a comprehensive dashboard for managers and a user-friendly interface for workers, ensuring effective safety management at every level.
Client
Role
Period
Award
Team
HHS (Health & Happiness System)
UX Designer
Spring 2020
IF 2021 Finalist, IDEA 2021 Finalist
Jiyoung Lee, Hyojung Jin, Hwang Kim
During my internship at SSID Design Lab, I joined a UX designer in this project. HHS, a leading smart safety helmet company, tasked us with designing a safety service centered around their helmets. Through close collaboration with stakeholders, physical design team and other designers we successfully created a seamless safety system that bridged the gap between physical and digital products, ensuring a cohesive user experience.
Award
Problem
A client company, HHS, created a smart safety helmets which can detect construction workers’ health status by detecting brainwave. HHS came to us in hopes to make a seamless safety system that workers can check their health status in real time and alram emergency situation immediately.
“How might we design an integrated safety system that construction workers and managers can monitor their health status in daily basis ”
Design Challenges
Establish an integrated safety system for construction workers taking advantage of smart-helmet technology.
1
Allow users to flow into the app in various contexts by providing appropriate functions that fit different situations.
2
Deliver brain-wave data intuitively to users.
3
Solution
Wave System
Wave System extends the experience to not only workers but also managers, while the wave hat itself only detects the basic information of accidents. The integrated system provides empirical aspects of accident prevention and workplace management.
With analyzed brainwave data, the Wave app extracts users' behavioral patterns from the construction site, increases awareness of the user's health status, and helps users with self-diagnosis and self-management.
Workers' behavior during work and after work is so different. As a result, the on-site and off-site modes were separated to provide different information and features depending on users' situations.
On-Site Mode
On-site Mode shows a clear data-centered layout that mainly shows users' conditions and platform feedback with direct action buttons for alarm and emergency. A visual representation of the current state of the worker is made using three-visible colors mapped to each user's measured brain-wave state on-site.
Off-Site Mode
Off-site mode, on the other hand, is a content-driven layout that delivers a soft and warm feeling with various curated health-related contents. Based on the collected brainwave data from the construction site, the Wave app delivers personalized safety tips and education as friendly snack content. This will achieve better safety self-management by behavioral change and habit-forming.
On-site data are transferred to the Wave Dashboard. To improve workers' safety and management efficiency, Wave Dashboard analyzes the collected data in real-time and sends them to the control platform seamlessly. Wave dashboard platform gives safety managers instant access from smartphones and tablets.
Desk Research
High fatalities in construction site.
However, no appropriate safety system and shortage of site managers
More than 1,700 people have died in accidents at construction sites in S.Korea in 2019. Industrial accident cases which are 82,780 in S.Korea remained at the top of the list of OECD fact book 2016.
However, there are not enough appropriate safety systems and awareness education programs. Furthermore, one safety supervisor was in charge of so many workers.
User Research
Stakeholders Interview
We took insights from the stakeholders’ interview, in which construction managers and workers participated.
User Matrix
Based on the observation in a real construction site, users’ behavior was organized in chronological order and grouped in certain keywords.
* The user research was conducted by hardhat product design team.
Based on the result of user research, which the product team handed, we could group certain insights through discussion which leads to the ideation phase successively.
Insights
1. Construction workers must check their health and take rest frequently, but they tried to avoid it for various reasons.
Workers tend to ignore their body aches worrying if they can’t work again. This may lead to worse consequences later on.
Managers recommend breaks from time to time, but it is impossible to take breaks in the field. A worker said, "Because various works are closely connected, I can't rest even if it's my break time."
2. For workers, mobile phone is a important channel of communication in noisy and spacious construction sites.
Workers often report and communicate with their mobile phones by taking pictures of sites.
Workers and Managers belong in many group chats, which causes them to get confused
Managers try to communicate with workers more often to build emotional ties.
3. There is limitations for managers to take care of workers' health in detail.
Managers do not document or manage Individual records because workers usually change within six months.
Only postmortem records are made when an accident happens.
The construction site and manager's office take usually more than 20 minutes by foot.
Information Architecture & Wireframe
Concept Video
Impact
As a solution to accidents caused by workers' fatigue and lack of safety managers, the Wave system has invested heavily in service design and user experience design to increase positive and proactive attitudes from users. Wave app and Dashboard transparently deliver users' physical and mental conditions in an intuitive way. Furthermore, appropriate safety education and self-safety management by habit-forming and behavioral change methods with a pleasant user experience can be the right strategy. Wave system can help workers and managers to have a safe and reliable work environment.
Benefit for Users
Reflection
Communication with multiple teams - Clients, Engineer, Physical product design team
While finding the direction of the design, we had lots of discussions with multiple teams such as the client company, engineer, and helmet product design team. Especially, learning sensors and functions from the product team helped to design the user experience a lot. I could think about what digital experience should we give to users while learning about a function of a sensor in a smart hardhat and its limitation. Through the whole process, I could learn how to communicate with others and how important it is to communicate with other teams.Expanding user experience to where a technology can’t reach
Although the design has started based on the technology, It was impressive to watch how the design can expand the range of user experiences. From technology to construction workers, from workers to managers, and from on-site service to off-site service. In each step, we, designers, expanded the influence of what technology can give. By watching the outcome that provides a broad realm of safety service that no one had expected, I could sink into the role of UX designer.