Before I started working on this project I did not know that a) user interfaces and earth-moving equipment had something in common and b) Leica produces something else besides high-end cameras. Well, that all changed when I met Leica’s Machine Automation Development Team in Switzerland. After the initial kick-off meeting I was amazed by this whole other world behind the yellow-and-black construction site ribbons and signs.
So, basically a lot has changed since I was a kid playing with toy bulldozers and excavators. There used to be a time when there were these people that would plan where buildings, roads, tunnels etc. should be built. Then comes this other guy that does all the on-site measuring, hammering down funny sticks and connecting them with thread. Then the groundwork starts and everybody hopes they know what they are doing and where they are. After some heavy earthmoving, stuff is built and construction is over. Well, not so with this technology.
Leica Geosystems Machine Automation enhances the earth-moving and building process in terms of time, precision and quality. Using their systems, the whole (future) construction site becomes a digital playground with no need of measuring in the classical sense. The whole area is grid-mapped and every machine is tracked to the spot and fed with information on what it should be doing, when and where. The GPS location and optically-determined position of every machine is recorded, as well as the position and rotation of its tools. This data is fed into one rugged, industry standard computer with a touch-screen attached to each machine for the operator to handle under any weather condition; snow, rain, direct sun, smoke and dust. Imagine that device vibrating with the machine engine and a big guy with big fingers in gloves operating the touch-screen to access one of the machine’s 700 functions and settings.
Now imagine following: that guy has never used a computer or a cell phone, and some are also illiterate. Welcome to my user requirement specification world.
Leica is offering these systems to be connected to bulldozers, excavators, graders, road pavers and slipform pavers all over the world and it is astonishing what these machines can accomplish.
Back to the user interface.
Knowing that a certain amount of users have no previous knowledge of computers, I went back to the basics and explored the world of my imaginary persona; Sunil (47), the construction worker from Alipura Chhatarpur, India. Just as computer OSes have “Desktops”, I needed an equivalent for this real-world analogy for him. And I found it.
Remember those flaps/tabs on the side of a phone book? You know how you can put stuff into drawers?
Behold the “tabs and drawers” UI 🙂
This UI can accommodate 800 functions, where there is a “drawer” capacity of 20 functions distributed over 5 screens with a maximum of 8 drawers per screen. With each new screen, the capacity doubles.
The concept lacked icons at this stage, but it’s important to stress that the icon world needed to be designed specifically for this user group, while, interestingly enough, those users that were illiterate had a distinctive capacity in differentiating forms and colors and interpreting icons. This information was given to me while developing this user interface, and was confirmed during user testing. By examining other icons used on construction machines (i.e. turtle symbol vs. rabbit symbol for “slow/fast”), I realized that this had been done before.
Couple of years later, studies were published on using text-free interfaces for illiterate people.
In different iterations, while playing with colored backgrounds and button sizes, different I/O elements were developed and tested in the field until they were acceptable.
The simulated working screen included a status bar, working area, toolbar and a shortcut button to frequently used settings.
The user interface has been slightly adapted and implemented on the actual embedded device.
The system was produced and was a great success. The photo below accompanied the official press release in 2006.
This user interface is also used on newer machines.
Here is a device from 2010.
