Steel-toed boots in the boardroom: Designing factory floor solutions that stick

Understanding user needs is the foundation of UX, but adoption is what makes solutions truly valuable. At Weir, a global industrial manufacturer, the SMART Factory team thought they knew what factory operators needed. Yet their solutions were being ignored (or even physically broken!).

This session shares how Weir’s UX team partnered with engineers to uncover real user needs, the creative methods required to co-create digital and physical tools that operators embraced, and how the UX team brought the factory floor into the boardroom to win global stakeholder buy-in.

It will be an interactive session looking at the context and the situation we faced and discussing options of how best to approach this project. I’ll then talk through how we went about it. This session is for UXers who lead on complex projects that have a lot of senior stakeholder attention.  

This session is for you if you regularly work on complex projects where stakeholder management and change management play as much of a role as the actual UX design work. It will speak through how to come into an existing project, get up to speed quickly, and immediately identify opportunities to add value. We’ll be collectively looking at some of the challenges we faced, collaboratively ideating how might we address those challenges, and I’ll then share how we approached these within this project.

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