Pevco Atlas
SCOPE
Dashboard redesign
MY ROLE
UX strategy, user research, UI design
MY DELIVERABLES
Wireframes, web interface, annotations
CONTRIBUTORS
Aline Lin, creative director
Misty Pacaco, junior UX designer
TOOLS
Figma
As hospital systems become expansive, they require more efficient ways of executing patient care. To rapidly transport samples and medication within the same complex, many facilities have turned to pneumatic tube systems. These pipelines use compressed air and suction to transport materials at a speed of roughly 25 feet per second, accelerating diagnosis and treatment dramatically as they eliminate the need for manual transportation. Companies like Pevco, the largest U.S.-owned pneumatic tube manufacturer, help a variety of clients with these needs, from freestanding facilities to medical centers with dozens of buildings.
System requirements for larger facilities can be physically daunting, but Pevco’s Atlas tube management software also poses a usability challenge. Technicians require substantial information to identify and repair problems, which can quickly become overwhelming for large networks with many runs of tubing. Our team was hired to audit the existing Atlas dashboard, study its functions, and suggest both design solutions and new features to improve users’ experience.
THE CHALLENGE:
Pneumatic tube systems are complex pieces of machinery, but Atlas’s dashboard interface was doing technicians no favors: their baseline repair process alone required 22 steps to execute.
To better understand Atlas, I visited the client’s headquarters to attend technician training for 2 days and observe the huge array of capabilities the dashboard offered. I quickly knew it would be impossible to radically simplify this software without losing critical functions, so consolidation and reorganization became the goal instead. I aimed to:
Reduce click paths and group related features together
Highlight key processes while minimizing less important ones
Divide content into like categories that follow common use patterns
Training also showed me that there are two general types of activities technicians do: those that look at a specific piece of the system, and those that gauge the health of the system as a whole. I used this dichotomy as the basis of my design structure, creating a two column layout. The right half’s content provides a consistent system overview, and the left half is changeable to handle complex diagnostic processes. Technicians often needed to consult both types of information at one time, so this structure eliminates the need to toggle back and forth between them.
I also observed that the majority of granular tasks involved either the equipment itself, or the processes that have occurred (or soon will) in the system. The information required for each of these categories was split between multiple pages, and further within multiple tabs or menus within said pages. I reorganized the dashboard contents so that all functionality related to each type of task was contained on its single master page; I also reorganized all components within to streamline the process as much as possible.
THE CHALLENGE:
Even the smallest pneumatic tube systems are composed of dozens of parts, each with their own functionality and data. Use cases can thus vary widely, but the Pevco Atlas UI did not offer the flexibility to cater to differing scenarios.
I knew from training that there were improvements that could be made for each core feature. However; the site as a whole had a larger flaw that needed to be addressed first. Technicians each had their own way of working, partially based upon system size. However, the layout did not change based upon not only what the user was looking to accomplish, or based upon their preferences.
In the past, Pevco offered a UI that users could deeply customize. However, this made customer service difficult, as agents would need to familiarize themselves with a specific user’s setup before even beginning to work on the issue. Customization would need to strike a practical balance between the two competing needs.
My solution was to allow the user to alter the UI based upon only two aspects:
Determining the primary vs secondary panel. One of the panels would take up 2/3 of the screen while the other would take up the remaining 1/3; users could toggle which was which, giving the primary panel of their choice more room to work.
Choosing a vertical or a horizontal view. The user could opt to rotate the screen to show the information in a tall, narrow format or a short, broad format. The information displayed would reorient accordingly, making some tasks easier to accomplish in one vs the other format.
This resulted in four potential layouts for the user to pick from, allowing them to find their own optimal workflow.
THE CHALLENGE:
The previous Atlas system used icons and color coding extensively, but its UI assumed expert knowledge and provided no explanations. In addition, the sheer quantity of these cues made memorization impractical to impossible.
The Pevco team was not incorrect in a strong icon and color system being necessary, but it had to be pared back to be easily understood, and explanation had to be readily available for newer users. To address this, I focused on a piece of the dashboard that may seem unusual: the navigation menu.
I knew that technicians need quick access to a large variety of options, so a mega menu solution that hides the majority of links risks becoming annoying over time. Yet with nearly a dozen different types of devices and activities, it would be impractical to keep them as standard visible navigation links. Instead, I used the opportunity to also solve the labeling concern by creating a stacked vertical navigation bar that displays all of the systemwide icons. Upon hover, the menu expands to reveal the name for each icon. Thus, the navigation acted as a key of sorts—if a user saw an icon and forgot its meaning, looking to the navigation bar, a consistently visible element that required zero clicks, would provide the answer.
Similarly, color coding on the original Atlas UI was used so excessively that it became overwhelming and difficult to follow. I was able to simplify this dramatically because I observed that in the majority of uses, there were only two options: essentially, on vs off, yes vs no. This allowed me to make the UI itself the color coding- if a status was significant, it was given the opposite color of the design, allowing it to catch the eye; if it wasn’t, the color would blend. There was only one exception: locking, in which devices could be unlocked, the system could lock it during activity, or the user could manually lock it. In this single instance, I instituted a yellow color throughout the entire dashboard to draw attention to user-locked items, as those required manual attention to unlock them.
THE CHALLENGE:
In progress
The Pevco team was not incorrect in a strong icon and color system being necessary, but it had to be pared back to be easily understood, and explanation had to be readily available for newer users. To address this, I focused on a piece of the dashboard that may seem unusual: the navigation menu.
I knew that technicians need quick access to a large variety of options, so a mega menu solution that hides the majority of links risks becoming annoying over time. Yet with nearly a dozen different types of devices and activities, it would be impractical to keep them as standard visible navigation links. Instead, I used the opportunity to also solve the labeling concern by creating a stacked vertical navigation bar that displays all of the systemwide icons. Upon hover, the menu expands to reveal the name for each icon. Thus, the navigation acted as a key of sorts—if a user saw an icon and forgot its meaning, looking to the navigation bar, a consistently visible element that required zero clicks, would provide the answer.