2023 Caterpillar UX Student Challenge
Every year, Caterpillar presents a challenge to the junior UX design class to research, then design a solution over the course of four months. The class is divided into teams and give Caterpillar employees as mentors to assist them during the challenge. My team won first place and presented our solution at Caterpillar’s monthly UX summit for World Usability Day.
Overview
For this year’s challenge, Caterpillar was looking for a design that is intuitive so all customers and dealers can easily pre-register their fluid samples online. The goal was to increase pre-registration from 30% to 70%.
Initial Research
Our initial research included a lab tour of Caterpillar’s SOS labs, being guided through their current (paper and digital) pre-registration process, competitive analysis against other fluid sample labs, proto-personas, and constructing user flows. These were all very helpful to frame the context of the how fluid samples would be pre-registered.
Ideation
Based on our research, we determined a mobile application with offline storage capabilities would be the ideal solution. We started by sketching screens, taking the current digital pre-registration process and making it more mobile friendly. The biggest concern we saw were how many form fields users were expected to fill out despite most of them being repetitive from information collected previously. We wanted to resolve this designing the app to pull all this information from a user’s prior sample, then giving the user the option to update anything that may have changed.
From these sketches, we were able to make a paper prototype. This helped us solidify the user flow before moving onto creating the high-fidelity designs. After multiple meetings with our mentors, these designs went through three iterations before we were able to user test.
User Testing (new tool!)
This challenge presented the opportunity to learn UserTesting.com. We set up unmoderated testing for our screens by writing a script and documented intended user flows. Our mentor put the script and our high-fidelity prototype into the website for us. Throughout that week, they sent us the videos with feedback from the seven people who tested the design.
We reviewed the videos of testing feedback and took extensive notes. These notes were taken with us when we spent the day at Caterpillar. While there, our mentors led us through an exercise in affinity mapping. This analysis revealed two main issues to resolve:
- Lack of text hierarchy
- Fuzzy UI feedback from certain features
Final Iteration
Once user feedback had been analyzed, the team knew what to work on. After a quick food break, I used the remaining time to upgrade the dashboard into a screen users would be able to quickly gather all the information they needed. I also clarified the button labels to reduce confusion. Once time was up, all the teams headed to the auditorium where we presented our solutions to each other, Caterpillar employees, and the judges. Results and feedback came out the following week: we won both the audience vote and first place from the judges!