Video calls with video glasses,
Sibur, 2021
Sibur produces polymers, rubber and other synthetic materials in its factories all over Russia. Thousands of engineers and mechanics work daily with generators, pumps and other complex equipment. My team and I developed a video call tool that helps to repair and maintain this equipment remotely using video glasses.
During the year working on this project, I designed the service interfaces for all devices and user roles and conducted 15 interviews, surveys and design sessions.
Maintenance and repair of equipment in Sibur factories requires a qualification that only vendor experts have. It takes a lot of time to manage a business trip for such a specialist, and the day of his work costs a lot as well. Also, the COVID made it almost impossible to manage such a business trip.
The solution was to use video glasses which would allow mechanics to carry out a repair and maintenance of equipment by their own hands while getting instructions from vendor experts who could see and hear everything as if they were in the factory themselves.
Realwear HMT-1Z1 glasses were chosen as such glasses. It is an Android mobile device which is mounted on a head (or a protective helmet), has voice control and a small display located a few centimetres from the user’s eyes:
Despite the unusual form factor, the picture from such a device is perceived almost the same as the picture from a regular smartphone in landscape mode.
Before we started framing problems and finding solutions, my team and I visited some of Sibur factories and watched how exactly the mechanics and engineers carried out repair work and we participated in several video calls using video glasses ourselves.
I conducted more than 10 interviews and surveys as well as two design sessions. As a result, I’ve got a CJM with a list of current and hypothetical problems and possible solutions to them:
Thus, we figured out some key limitations:
every consultation costs money, so each use of the glasses must be approved by managers,
factories are large, there are a lot of equipment and employees but not enough glasses,
every worker should have the possibility to use the glasses to carry out a repair,
devices of that kind are a novelty for most factory workers and many of them never used voice control devices,
and information security limitations.
My primary task was to design such a process of managing and using glasses that an operator – that’s what we called a person in video glasses – would have a minimum of struggles and questions while connecting to the call as well as using them during the call.
Solution: Connecting to the call
To achieve such results I along with my team had to figure out the entire process of using glasses: from the moment a need for glasses arises to the very end of a repair.
After several approaches, we have settled on the next process and roles:
Such a process allowed the operator not to worry about whom to call and when.
I designed the interface that helps the stakeholder to make a request. He fills in two obligatory fields: the purpose of the work and the location. Other fields, such as the time of the call, contacts of the experts and so on, could be filled in later by both the stakeholder and the glasses manager:
The glasses manager receives a request, specifies the date and the time when both the operator and the expert can carry out a repair, makes sure that at least one pair of the glasses is available at that time, and connects these glasses to the call:
Thus, any Sibur worker responsible for the equipment operation can use the glasses. In this case, they don’t need to arrange the appointment with the expert, find time for the call and try to understand whether the glasses are available at that time – this work will be done for them.
The main advantage of such a process is that once the call has been agreed, the glasses already "know" which call they should connect to, so the operator can simply switch them on and wear them, and the glasses will automatically connect to the call:
The operator can participate in several calls back-to-back, so the necessary details of the call are displayed before it starts: what should be done and where, participants and the time before it starts.
If the call is already in progress, the operator immediately gets into the call:
The operator spends with this interface most of the time. We provided a test launch, and the support got almost no questions on how to use the glasses.
However, one of our hypotheses was confirmed: sometimes the operator doesn’t hear the expert because of the low connection quality or a noisy environment. That’s why we added the possibility to get text messages and stickers:
The operator can hide the chat by saying "Read later" and open it later.
Solution: Call on the Expert side
The expert receives a link to the call by e-mail, clicks on it and gets into the waiting room:
I made the call interface look similar to popular video messengers to make it easier to use:
We made just a few tools in addition to video and audio communication, including text messaging and stickers:
During a year since the pilot launch users conducted more than 150 video calls using our service and saved more than 7 million dollars for the company.
The number of counselling sessions has increased multiple times, and we have seen that the remote format is not worse than the offline one. And the time from the need to repair to the actual repair has decreased.
We almost didn’t receive any negative feedback or questions about using the glasses. Most of the complaints were about the quality of communication, and our team continued to work on improving it.
We didn’t implement a lot of features: for example, the onboarding, or improved booking system that allowed stakeholders to book the glasses by themselves with no Glasses Manager in charge.
Do not be afraid to question long-standing processes. Sibur is a huge company and many of its processes are bureaucratic and have not improved for a long time, but seem very reasonable to us at first glance. However, researching deeper and deeper showed us every time that much is done simply out of habit. For example, the first iteration of the process of call approval took a lot of time, but with the second approach, we found out that some of its steps could be easily removed.
And at the same time, do not try to fix everything at once. Small improvements lead to the big ones, step by step.
