Avvir
Self-Serve Report Builder for Tracking Errors
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Tools
Figma
Dovetail
Miro
Methods
User Interviews
Design Workshop
Mockups
Usability Testing
What We Researched.
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How we could enable customers [Project Managers (PMs), Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) Managers] to create their own Reports, and to share, download, and view them on any device (i.e. mobile phones)
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How PMs and VDC Managers, and Supers discover field issues
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How their teams internally communicate and track these issues
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Validate if customer-created Reports would help improve their issue tracking workflow
Opportunities
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For customers
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Almost every customer we spoke to had a hackey and inaccurate way of manually tracking these significant deviations outside Avvir
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Interest in choosing what ends up in Avvir’s reports
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For Avvir
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Creating Reports was an incredibly manual process that contributed to Avvir’s Cost of Goods Sold
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Productizing reports would keep customers on Avvir, and could drive them to engage more with the app
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Who We Spoke to.
2 PMs
1 Customer
1 Non-customer
2 VDC Managers
All customers
1 Super
Non-customer
We learned that customers struggled to know what to look at in Avvir's list of elements that, upon construction, had deviated from their intended positions.
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“Overwhelming”
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“A whole Christmas tree of stuff that’s lit up.”
Customers wanted control over creating Avvir Reports because they know what's the important stuff in a project.
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“It would be nice to… have more control over what clashes are reported”
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Beneficial because “some things that I knew weren’t issues were included in a deviation highlight and some things I wanted to include as part of that deviation highlight weren’t caught.”
Every General Contractor (GC) does things differently.
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Some are highly organized, others not as much
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GC teams can use several issue tracking software, even across different projects within the same company
Customers need to assign an issue to the relevant project participant to get it resolved.
Superintendants are most accessible on cell phones; they could benefit from using a simple mobile issue tracker so that there could be more live data.
Our team started thinking what customers needed from a new Reports UI was issue tracking features for these deviation highlights.
But first we needed to test this idea.
We put together a prototype based on ideas we came up with with several folks internally, and tested its usability with Avvir customers, and to get a sense if they would even want to manage and track issues on Avvir.
We tested with:
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2 VDC PMs
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1 VDC Manager
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1 VDC Engineer
I designed the following experience to account for additional creating, reading, updating, and deleting interactions:
Adding to Existing Reports
Enabling Users to view their Reports
We provided a call-to-action for users that links them to their report, once they create a new report, or add an item to an existing one.
Deleting Issues from Reports
Deleting Reports
Users needed a way to delete reports, and we thought this page’s empty state was a great opportunity to inform them that they could head to to the app’s 3D Viewer so that they could start building reports that they would then see on this page.
Mobile UI
With users like Supers in mind who are most accessible on cell phones and that could benefit from access to live data, I made sure the new Reports UI would be responsive and mobile device friendly.
We learned that customers probably won't use Avvir Reports for issue tracking.
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They all mentioned they were currently using other issue tracking software like Procore, Revizto, and BIMTrack
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They “might not” or “probably wouldn’t” use a new Reports UI on Avvir for tracking issues
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We scaled back issue enriching features like adding assignee or priority.
We learned that customers liked creating their own reports on Avvir!
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“The idea of us putting things on a report… allows us to save some time if [Avvir] isn’t putting things on there that aren’t of interest to us.”
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We didn’t make it clear how to add deviations to either an existing report or to a new one, so we made this more explicit via a menu.
Customers liked being able to inspect deviations directly from a Report.
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2 users acknowledged the ‘View in 3D Viewer’ button we provided for each deviation as a “good function to have”
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A 3rd user couldn’t find the button but hoped for such a functionality
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We removed expanding and collapsing issues to view this button and more details
Outcomes
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Engineering team built and shipped the new Reports UI
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Avvir Ops adopted it as the means to create reports for customers
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Customers are viewing their reports, plans in place for them to create their own reports starting in 2024
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It may make sense to enable integration functionality in this new Reports UI