Internet of Things with NCC Roads

NCC wanted to make life easier for paver foremen, who juggle planning and issue-handling on busy worksites. Our team designed a prototype that connected data from smart pavers and IoT equipment, showing how digital tools could transform their daily work.

Unfamiliar domain

As consultants, none of us had worked in road paving or construction before. We had to quickly immerse ourselves in the field to understand workflows, terminology, and pain points.

Timebound

We had just four weeks to research the context, uncover user needs, and deliver a prototype. Every day counted.

Bad weather

January in Denmark meant cold, wet conditions that made on-site observations impossible. We had to find creative ways to learn about paving work without being able to shadow crews directly.

Understand

Contextual Inquiry

We sat with planners at NCC Roads to understand how they work today. What systems they use, who they work with, what do they care about, and what problems do they have.

Watch recordings

The weather was too cold so unfortunately, we couldn’t visit a live paving job. Instead, we reviewed recordings and spoke with NCC Roads to get us a better understanding for the task at hand.

Create a persona

We distilled our findings into a persona, and presented this back to NCC Roads for feedback.

The persona would then be used during our design phase to help us ground our decisions based on the foreman’s needs.

Explore

Affinity Diagram

The smart paver had a lot of information, but it had no organisation.

During a workshop, we put each piece of information onto a Post-it note, and with the project team, we begun to organise them into groups.

Whiteboarding

The Visual Designer and I started discussing what we had learnt so far and began storyboarding how we might solve the foreman’s needs.

Prototyping

I created low fidelity prototypes in Axure RP based on the storyboards from the whiteboarding session.

We created several concepts and discussed pros and cons of each.

The foreman would be using a Microsoft Surface Pro, so we tested our prototypes using the target device.