The crude oil well-building process is a delicate and time-consuming process, it doesn’t always end up the way it was expected to, engineers that build these wells go through many learnings while they are building and drilling the well and those learnings could be put to better use and not repeat the mistakes.
The requirement of this project is to digitize one such tool in order for the wells engineers to be able to visualize the process, learn the status of each stage easily document their learnings, and change the WET tool at the right frequency to make the tool more useful.
My role
- User research
- Product design
- Implementation overview
To dig deeper into the business goals, users’ asks, and technical feasibilities, I planned a series of exercises. Below is detailed writing about the exercises and their outputs.
Business needs understanding
Objective: To learn what business needs from this solution in the long term and strategically, how should this product interact with other applications in the ecosystem, who are the target audience for this product and when can we call this product a success.
Participants: Product sponsor, product owner, project manager, 2 wells engineers
Stakeholder exploration
Objective: Get a visual representation of all the people who can influence the product and prioritize whose needs to be taken seriously
Participants: Product sponsor, project manager, product owner. The intention of this exercise was to.
The outcome of this exercise was still considered hypothetical as it mostly came from the product sponsor, who could have been more biased towards business needs than the users’ needs. I made a plan to evaluate this while interviewing the stakeholders.
Gathering data from the users
We interviewed around 8 users across the stakeholder map.
Objectives:
- Learn WET’s placement in the wells building process
- Understand each users’ pains and gains in the as-is process and tools they use at present
- Get to know various job roles, importance of collobaration between each role and how we can help them collaborate better while using WET tool
- How can we automate WET and which other applications in turn be automated from the data generated by WET
Outcome:
In order to analyze the data gathered during stakeholder interviews and business focal meetings
Empathy map
Users traversing stages while designing a well
What features should the product has
Prioritizing features for MVP
Solutions – low fedility concepts
Based on the features and functionalities that were uncovered, we started creating low-fidelity concepts. Below are some samples of the concepts which went into the final stage after the A/B test.
Concept 3
Concept 2
A/B testing of concepts
We created 3 low fidelity concepts and conducted an A/B test on them in a feature-to-feature comparison. Based on final scores, concepts 3 and 1 were very closely competing and the best way to decide were technical resources and time required to develop those solutions. So we conducted technical feasibility on concepts 1 & 3.
Technical Feasibility
Based on the low fidelity designs suggested technologies were PEGA, SurveyJS, and custom development. We did a feature to feature comparison between 3 technologies and custom development was the most feasible
High fedility designs
This project is still in progress.
