Project Overview

We wanted to create an app that would deliver to the corporate world from large data sources like a CMMS in the way that people are used to interacting with the smart phones and tablets with the same high level of design, navigation and user experience that the best applications provide.

Organisation

CHS Engineering Services LTD

Team

To build the Foundations Pulse app we assembled a quality team to bring the project forward, concept & design was by the in house CHS Development team – www.chsservices.com

Technical & build: Decoded solutions
Technical solution, User interface & build.

Overlay/user design: Twist Interactive Design
User interface designs & website build

Having worked with both Decoded and Twist before we were confident in the team to deliver a great solution on this project.

Project Brief

As a team we decided to create a new app that would not only translate complex hard to find data but also deliver a user experience that could visualise this information into a usable format - typically provided today by platforms across many reports and spread sheets. We wanted to deliver live, on demand translated content for in hand decision making. We treated this challenge with a focus on interactive design with a face optimised for touch that would bring our content to the front.

Project Innovation/Need

We find with large corporate sites, our clients are data rich and information poor. They need their information displayed to them in a way that can inform the decision making process on demand. Before CHS we would find that our client would need input from multiple departments, people and reports to summarise some of the most basic information on their systems performance typically taking days to work through this process.

Our Foundations Pulse app takes out the delay in being able to reach quality summarised information and unique to our app is the ability to navigate sites of thousands of assets through touch, fast and efficiently, to review the performance of any one.

The key success driver for Foundations Pulse is to be able to take customer’s large data sets, translate and summarise into clear high level dashboards for all levels of user.

Design Challenge

One of the biggest challenges we faced was how to translate the many data sources and big data into a simple to use, elegant well designed interface. This involved a lot of testing and feedback during the design process with the public and customers and we believe we’ve built the beginnings of a great platform to build upon.

Future Impact

When putting the app together the key focus was the visual user experience through the tablet interface backed by the powerful data we had to work with. This has resulted in a clean interface aimed at just bringing the facts of the data to the surface. Users can scroll through top level summarisations, pin them and can tap to drill through for more detail.

Navigating of assets through touch was a challenge, we made use of the windows 8.1 semantic zoom view allowing the user to pinch out to grouped levels by first letter of the asset tree. Typically assets are found within a few seconds, this is further enhanced as each asset tile contains an image of the asset for quick visual reference. Since release we have been getting great feedback and have been getting many 5 star reviews in the app store.