Sewage Treatment

Thames Water are one of the oldest water utility companies in the UK with a vast area spanning from the edges of Hampshire to the east of London. Thames have had a lot of negative press recently and have banded together a team through Equal Experts to create a new Android application to help keep their sewage treatment works compliant.

Android App

To keep compliant with the Environmental Agency we needed to make sure that the Tech 1’s who enter the information on the sewage treatment plants had the right bit of kit. The basic idea was to take their current logbook and create an E-logbook with more in-depth information to cover the extra requirements from the EA. This did mean that the Tech 1’s had more to enter but that was part of the challenge through the design process.

Management Dashboard

It became clear that building all the key functionality within the app would have caused the app itself to be far too busy and confusing. Especially with the number of personas it would need to cater for. Therefore we moved forward with the idea of a management/analytics dashboard housed on a web platform. This then gave us the ability to use separate views and give each user a bespoke view that they could analyse.

Key take aways

We began with just desktop but soon realised that users in the field also needed to view historical data. Once this discovery had been found out we switched to Mobile first design

Configurator

Once the Dashboard was completed we moved toward creating a suit of products that could be run by a lightweight CMS platform. I named it Thamesnet T-5000. It initially started life as a wizard to create a site or edit existing one however due to the complexity and time constraints we hit the simplify button and turned it down to a simple CSV upload system. It’s a real shame as the designs had been tested and were loved by the End users

20 weeks of UCD

The project length was original a 12 week pilot/ proof of concept. Within the first 12 weeks I went through several iterations of the app and dashboard. So much so that I had to bring the designs back a step for the MVP. Once we had the second round of funding the team were then able to catch up on the designs through the prioritisation process. Considering our timeframes and business hurdles we had a stella outcome and the users loved being involved in the project.