a major industrial equipment manufacturer
Redesigned industrial NDT X-ray inspection software after watching operators fight the old one on the floor — cut task completion time by a quarter.
Role
UX strategy & lead designer
task completion time
-25%
The problem
The existing desktop software for operating industrial X-ray inspection equipment was built around what the hardware could do, not around what an operator does in a shift. Errors and slow completion times traced back to a workflow that fought the people using it daily.
Approach
- 01
Ran field research directly with operators on the equipment floor rather than relying on secondhand requirements from engineering — watched actual inspection sessions, not simulated walkthroughs.
- 02
Identified the specific root-cause workflow failures causing repeated errors and lost time, rather than treating the whole interface as equally broken.
- 03
Redesigned the flow around the operator's actual sequence of physical and digital actions during an inspection.
Decisions
Redesign from operator sequence, not screen inventory
Rather than auditing existing screens one by one, the redesign started from mapping the physical inspection sequence an operator performs, then built the software's flow to match it — this is what actually produced the time reduction, not a visual refresh.
Outcome
Task completion time for the core inspection workflow dropped 25%, measured against the previous software version.
Outcome measured against the prior version, from the field research described above.