Barrick
We worked closely with Barrick, the largest gold mining company in the world to establish a digital transformation.
We prototyped this effort in one of their mines over a multi-year period. My team of four designers spent eight months on the project and we worked with a much larger team of approximately twenty consultants, data scientists, engineers, and vendors.
Our IMPACT was to increase the efficiency of the mine but also to implement technology that might increase safety. Our partner Cisco installed wireless in the mine, we implemented autonomous and semi-autonomous systems and built numerous mining applications
We executed extensive Generative User Research and early in the project, I had the opportunity to conduct contextual inquiries in the mine itself. This effort produced numerous invaluable insights that drove our design efforts Mapping was key, but also adherence to the mine plan was challenging.
Later our team did Evaluative Research on the apps we developed. We tested during development with miners both above and below ground in ride-alongs in the mine to observe usage.
We created numerous sketches of existing and future experiences to depict our insights. Additionally, we mapped these experiences to "show, not tell" how things were done and where things could go. This very much helped our clients and stakeholders understand what we were doing. The experience map depicted above was emergent but drew from earlier versions. Iteration is key. Perhaps most importantly, our “personas” were not amalgams, but actual workers from the mine to make the work feel more tangible.
Miguel, our mine manager, needed to understand the progress on various work tasks reported by the miners, this information needed to be available to him on the go so our iPad and iPhone apps were critical.
The suite of applications we developed included mapping tools critical for Killer, one our miners, to know where his work was for that shift.
Supervisors track his activity both to understand he was following the mine plan but also for safety purposes. The mine was like an ants' nest. Our team simplified the view, color coding, and labeling each heading (D2 above denotes a heading - a location where ore was being removed), along with zoomed views to show where assets (trucks and other equipment) were located.
The mine supervisor Joe, needed to understand high-level progress and see and view crew members. Safety was a top priority so knowing where his crew was at any given time meant he could help if needed.
We worked closely with Barrick to brand the effort without rebranding the company itself. We leveraged the existing logo but created a series of images to show traditional mining getting "digitized." We were acutely aware of how homogenous the existing team was so we worked with HR to expand diversity for potential new hires. Lastly, each location at the mine had a name. I came up with CodeMine for the digital team's space.
As mentioned, the digital team had a space to work in we named the CodeMine. It was a bare warehouse and we helped to redesign the interior. Inset are pictures from the work in progress.