ABOUT FORST ASSISTANCE
4. Semester / User Experience Design
In this course called "UX-Design I" my team and I are trying to simplify the daily life of forest workers.
Forst Assistance is a concept of a data acquisition application for foresters. It's able to make tree inventory more easily and also adds the ability to scan the height and width of trees. This infomration is used to calculate the volume of the wood. For organisation purposes there is a desktop application. It shows the orders, forestmaps and notifications to make the communication between stakeholders more efficient.
Research
We started our research by interviewing our user groups. We did interviews with the forester of Mutlangen near Schwäbisch Gmünd and with future forest workers at the forest training centre in Gschwend.
trainees forest workers
Findings
They told us about their normal work day and also about some things that are not yet working perfectly and therefore need improvement. The forester told us about the long process of tree inventory and the often tricky communication between them and the forest workers. Additionally the calculation of wood masses in one area is complicated but necessary for their inventory.
workspace in our "Prototyping Lab"
Workspace
We started collecting and clustering all information in our beloved "Prototyping Lab".
We used Design Methods like Affinity Diagram, Empathy Map and Idea Towers to develop our ideas.
Prototype: digitalized Kluppe
Prototype
Based on our research and the meetings with our lecturers we decided to improve the whole process of data transfering and organisation in the tree harvesting.
For this, we need to improve the device of the forest workers, they use a so called "Kluppe" for measuring the felled trees. Thereafter we built a first functional prototype. We have digitized the "Kluppe" to use the measurement data further.
We have used an Arduino Uno together with a distance sensor.
App Prototype in Adobe XD
Forester's App
As said before we want to improve the whole process of data transfering and organisation in the tree harvesting and inventory.
So we also thought about the foresters. At the moment they use a device called PSION (it looks like a big old phone with a small keyboard) to note down the trees to be felled. For this part of the project we work on a "redesign" of the PSION device. But not in a way of a hardware prototype, because our interview partner told us he has a smartphone for work anyway.
So we develop a App for the forester, in which he can insert his trees as before, but is supported by the application. We used Adobe XD to build a high fidelity prototype of the User Interface.
You can see parts of this prototype in the linked video on top of this article.
Supervisor: Michael Ognew, Jonathan Bölz
Partners: Dominik Fink, Jana Seemann
Key Skills: User Research, Concept Ideation, Visual Design, Video production