Industry Project | Activity based Engineering Studio

The Challenge: Many software manufacturers have now understood that their software should not only contain useful functions to represent a process digitally, but it must also be able to be understood and used by a wide range of people. This is also the case for CopaData's extensive and complex automation software "Zenon", where the first optimization ideas for a more easily understandable user interface have to be developed. The central challenge here is to recognize the most diverse users from the most diverse business sectors and to understand which problems they have when using Zenon in their everyday work. Based on these identified problems for different users, it is then necessary to develop helpful optimization ideas. The Definition of Goals: The goal of the project is to create prototypical users, also called Personas. With the help of the Personas, optimization ideas should then be developed in the form of a 2D prototype, using Adobe software and an existing concept should be evaluated from a user's perspective, too. The Approach: The group of four Master's students started by familiarizing themselves with Zenon in order to better understand the functions and logic of the software. Afterwards, expert interviews were conducted with CopaData employees, who are in contact with end customers in order to find out what challenges the different customers face with Zenon, what problems they have when working with Zenon and what improvements they would like to see. Afterwards the interviews were transcribed, analyzed and categorized. Based on these results, prototype users were created. From the perspective of these prototypical users, individual User Journeys in Zenon are generated to identify problems in use. Then, the identified problems were analyzed and solution approaches were developed in the form of sketches and a 2D prototype using Adobe XD. In addition, an existing optimization concept was analyzed from the perspective of a Persona and feedback was provided.