PZSE | Sharmaine Maglasang

Structural Engineering and
Consultation Services 👷

Year

2021

Project Type

Web Application

Team

Founder, Client, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Lead Engineer, Full Stack Developer, Backend Developer, Frontend Developer, QA Analyst, UI/UX Designer

Role

UI/UX Designer

Problem

Solar Panel Installation is not as simple as it sounds. It entails the involvement of various professionals such as engineers and quality assurance experts who meticulously assess the structural viability of the building for solar panel integration.   

Safety considerations, feasibility of accommodating numerous solar panels, and other related questions are thoroughly examined.
 
Managing a project of such magnitude often leads to an overwhelming amount of paperwork and a continuous back-and-forth communication loop with the client for approvals, data confirmation, and payments.

The manual effort involved can be demanding and poses a considerable challenge for all parties involved.

Solution

PZSE offers the solution to relieve Engineers of the manual labor.

Although they had an older app to do these things, it lacked functionality and the design was not aesthetically pleasing and clean.

The new PZSE Web Application can now automate tasks, manages data seamlessly, facilitates approvals, and ensures smooth communication and transactions through a user-friendly web application.
 
To enhance organization, we've implemented a user type hierarchy for optimal application management. This hierarchy includes the Super Administrator, PZSE Administrator, Engineers, External Engineers (doubling as the Quality Assurance team), and the clients themselves.

Struggles/Learnings

How can I design an application that is heavy on data?

With a lot that has been going on, it can be overwhelming to present a whole load of data. What more on the user side.   

As a designer, I didn’t have much background on the Engineering technicalities so I had to fully observe how the previous app worked and what didn’t worked.

It was hard working with a cluttered system but it all worked out with proper organization—less accessed information hidden and important information placed in user hot spots.

How can I design an application where the
targeted audience is not tech savvy?

I have always been interested in accessibility but it is easier said than done.   

Since there was no active need to integrate a much more advanced accessibility feature, what I did for the moment was make text more legible, make icons common with labels and one that is easy to understand at first glance, good color contrast between elements, and made use of colors to accompany text or icons to signify positive or negative specific functions.

How can I design an application where there is no documentation for the previous app version?

When I got on the team, it was a bit confusing with no documentation and brand guidelines to base on. This would’ve been the foundation of the new application version.

However, instead of getting stumped with the lack of documents, I made this as an opportunity to learn more about the application from scratch by following the flow as a user and not as a designer.

This opened new perspectives and in turn had come up with solutions along the way.

How can I design a large scale of application in a

tight schedule?

Upon joining the team, I had quickly realized the delay that this project had been put on hold. So the team needed to double time on design and development. It had come to a point where parallel coding was inevitable.

Although I could stay late at night just to keep up with the deadlines, it was still unrealistic and toxic to the whole team.

This was not a design problem, but as a designer, I had to voice out necessary concerns to the project manager.

As a solution, we had to stop accepting new job orders or revisions on top of the old ones which weren’t finished yet. With that endless loop, nothing could be finished on time.

How can I design an application where stakeholders are willing to design with you?

Suggestions are always welcome as much as critics, but I have yet to find a designer who was able to tap on their full potential with someone hovering above their shoulders.

This was definitely the most challenging part as I have always been democratic and doesn’t like conflicts.

However, through time, I’ve managed to pull through, enhanced my English vocabulary and stood by my decisions.

Process

In the early stages of this development, it was hard to determine what direction we were going for.

However, through time, we settled for Agile Methodology.  As for the framework, we were using Scrum, to organize the tasks and releases.

Below is a quick visual of how the team works in making this application.