The Project:  Every morning for more than 40 years, New York City's Sanitation Department had been calculating how to allocate Personnel and route Trucks (over 8000 items) to pick up the garbage and snowplow the streets using colored index cards!!  Unwieldy and inefficient, this system desperately needed to move into the digital world.

 

The Challenge:  Develop a real-time, distributed, planning and reporting software to allow 50 city-wide Sanitation district chiefs, their 7 Borough-level supervisors and their Sanitation HQ leaders, identify, schedule, manage and report out all daily Sanitation Department Personnel and Equipment assignments created against pre-defined production quotas.  The system would be constrained not only by already-approved long-range technology equipment and database purchases, but also had to deliver a digital experience that matched users' extremely familiar paper mental model, to expedite training and system transition.

 

As the User Experience Director for this multi-year project, I first dove into direct user research of the Sanitation workers, observing their current paper system in the districts and boros and trailing Personnel assignments.  I realized a successful solution must replicate the color scheme of the index cards (as they had already taken on their own legal meanings in the Department) and that their by-hand manipulation was best mirrored digitally through drag-and-drop gaming metaphors.  Almost a Tetris of garbage trucks and personnel.

 

In collaboration with Department Technical and Business Unit SMEs, I developed an Ecosystem and Information Architecture of container monitors, digital task rows and colored, annotated Personnel and Truck 'cards' that could be dropped and moved around in realtime on Boards that Department quotas pre-defined for each day of the year.  Special Boards existed for holidays and events like the Thanksgiving Parade, as well as emergency boards when garbage trucks switch duty to snow-plows, and global settings.  Finally, I developed a Garage Display Monitor view, modeled on airport departure boards, that showed Sanitation workers all daily shifts, along with Personnel and Trucks assignments per route.

 

In parallel, I led a team of UX and visual designers to define the Color Pallete, Visual Design Styleguide and UX Functional Specifications.  Upon first-phase rollout, I developed usability/QA testing modules and participated in User Training on the new system.

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Watch the Department-produced video above to see the quality results:  a user-centric approach not only delivered a system that matched users mental models, but also cut training time in half from plan, because users grasped the system so easily.  I'm proud that I could deliver something so crucial yet unobserved to the backbone of my city, to be used for years to come.

 

Tasks + Deliverables:

New Product Development, Onsite User Observation Research, Requirements Gathering + Business Goals, Ecosystem, User Journey, Information Architecture Flowcharts and Wireframes, Color Palette definition, A/B User Testing, Visual Styleguide, UX Functional Specifications, Usability Testing, User Training