The Silicon Valley Approach is a Tragedy Waiting to Happen for Energy UX – So How Should We Design When Futures are at Stake?
With great impact comes great responsibility. Light-touch design approaches don't cut it in safety-critical environments where even a small mistake could be fatal. So how do you get it right when you simply can’t afford to get it wrong?
For consumers, a bad user experience is like having an annoying fly in the room. Frustrating and distracting, but no big deal, right? People are not generally harmed by a subscription service or a hotel booking app interface.
In industry, it’s a different story. Yes, UX can mean the difference between business success and disaster. But it can also mean the difference between life and death. Design a bad solution in nuclear and you lose an entire zip code, for example.
Today, most UX design is crammed into the agile methodology, with a few tweaks to make sure that what you're designing fits real user needs. But the data is clear: when energy companies fall into the weak-design trap, they run the risk of getting it horribly, expensively, life-threateningly wrong.
How bad can it get?
There are too many examples of bad UX costing lives. In healthcare, for instance, lots of Electronic Health Record systems suffer from what’s been labeled “Death by Inferior Design.” This is where the interface "kills" productivity by costing medics additional time, instead of freeing up time. Sometimes, the death occurs literally, as described in the story of how bad UX killed Jenny.
One death is tragic. But in the energy sector, the potential for loss is exponentially higher.
In 2019, a massive explosion injured three people at a Texas chemical plant and became the latest in a string of industrial incidents in the region. A cascade of errors led to the disaster. Fundamentally though, it came down to some gauges that were so poorly designed, workers didn’t trust what they perceived as “abnormal” readings even though they turned out to be accurate.
Just over a decade earlier, in 2005, Texas City was the site of another horrendous explosion, this time at a BP refinery. That accident killed 15 people, injured 180 others, and caused billions of dollars in economic losses. Even though industrial plant processes can't be simplified to one tool or one click like an Amazon purchase, what accident investigators uncovered here was a textbook example of how to create a bad user experience. The plant's workflows were so complex and non-intuitive that workers ignored the risk and tolerated non-compliance
As with many headline-hitting incidents, we tend to focus on the human cost. But for every bad UX that kills people, there are literally hundreds more that are killing projects, killing profits, and putting energy transformation projects at risk.
What’s going wrong?
Besides the fact that these examples ended tragically, the single most important thread that ties them together is this: an impressive lack of consideration for those who actually use the product.
To understand what's happening, we need a quick history lesson about how UX design methodologies have evolved over the years.
Originally, big business had the waterfall approach. This is where the client takes a long time—often many months or years—to write requirements. They hand this huge, exhaustive and most likely out-of-date or out-of-touch pile of documents over to engineering. Months or years later, the engineers come back with a software product that has moved at a snail’s pace with no releases along the way. And it’s probably going to be a big mess at the end as a result of working in isolation.
The waterfall process is very linear. It's also very risky since there's little opportunity for iteration and the whole world has likely changed by the time the product is shipped.
So then we moved to agile, which leans on Mark Zuckerberg's now-famous motto: “Move fast and break things." Agile is all about small teams, two-week sprints, constant iteration and quick progress to try and stay ahead of a rapidly changing world
Around a decade ago, agile aligned with something called design thinking. This is a hands-on approach to figuring out what users need from the end product. It calls for a high degree of empathy and understanding of users, as well as the freedom to brainstorm a bunch of crazy ideas to find the best solution. Put simply: if agile builds solutions to solve problems, then design thinking is a way of identifying the right problems to solve in the first place. The two go hand in hand.
Is there a process in the room?
The agile/design thinking approach has its merits and it’s surely better than waterfall when it comes to laying the bricks down. But it doesn't account for what shape the house needs to be in the first place.
Explicitly, agile is focused on developers. It doesn't include an adequate timeline or process to capture and measure the human experience of a technological change. Nor does it account for the time, resources and research that UX designers need to understand these human-related challenges before you incur the expense of code.
In theory, design thinking should alleviate some of these problems. But in the context of agile, designers are under enormous pressure to imagine, test, refine, and deliver their output unrealistically fast. No successful mission-critical system was ever built without rigorous requirements gathering and validation—but agile/ design thinking reinforces the fallacy that design is easy. That anyone can scribble an opinion on a post-it note and it becomes a design feature, confirming all the biases and highest-paid opinions in the room (not the field).
Where's the rigor in that?
This is not just our opinion, it’s backed up by data. Across a wide range of projects, agile has been shown to improve development success but not business results. When applied to the energy sector, success falls to just 4-11% (Kurt Cagle).
Innovation inside the safety box: a new vision for energy UX
To be good designers for the energy industry, we can't afford to get it wrong. We can't just move fast and break things because the risks are too great. We need to take a different approach—one that's more considered, more purposeful, and more rooted in the bigger ecosystem that's at play in safety-critical environments.
Fundamentally, there's a nice, even cadence between rushing a solution to the field and taking five years to get it "right." Our approach hits the Goldilocks spot in the middle. We call it move deliberately and fix things. Collect the facts, then build strategic roadmaps. Measure twice and cut once. Experiment and iterate in a mature way. It's not about the time to solve a problem, it's about what you're doing with the time. Get the pace right, and you ensure 100% success on the other side.
Uniquely with this approach, you also guarantee that only high-value projects move forward and resources are never wasted on projects with insufficient business value. This is absolutely critical for energy transformation success.
I'll be talking lots more about this in the coming weeks and months, starting with the World Usability Conference in Austria. And watch out for more blogs and downloadables that will talk a bit more about the specific methodology we use when designing complex software for the biggest names in oil and gas, power generation, and renewables—with a 100% success rate.
This is just a taste of what's to come. To get the full picture, join us next week at the World Usability Conference and keep an eye on our socials for the low down. Can't wait to see you there!