SIMA Web and Mobile App

Problem

Keeping track of and maintaining street signage is tedious and labour intensive.

Hundreds of thousands of street signs are being relied upon at this very moment to keep people moving safely throughout the world. Within the City of Toronto alone, thousands of labour hours are required to erect, maintain, and remove street signs on an annual basis. To make problems worse, City staff are forced to use outdated software to perform the aforementioned tasks. Our goal is to make the lives of City staff easier by giving them better tools to perform their duties.

Research has revealed that municipalities are maintaining and replacing street signs in a reactive manner. This means a sign is only replaced if a worn-out sign is noticed by city staff.

As such, our Dashboard and Mobile apps aim to improve the sign maintenance process in two ways:

Tracking the shelf life of street signs to proactively predict maintenance and replacement activities.
Decrease the time it takes to inspect signs by equipping inspectors with an easy to use digital inspection tool.

Process

One of the many constraints I had to contend with was the absence of in-depth research. A lack of resources in conjunction with the spread of a global pandemic limited our research capability to only one external user interview and field study. Competitive research was unavailable as well, because our product is currently the first of it's kind in the industry.

Despite this setback, we were able to draw insights and expertise from our CEO who had six years of experience in the street sign manufacturing and municipal operations industry. With these inputs, we were confident enough in our assumption to move forward with the project.

The artifacts created to help solve our problem included an affinity map, a red route map, user flows, a user journey, and eventually low-fi wireframes.

Solution

As we rapidly created high-fi mockups and prototypes of the municipal web and mobile apps, the team soon realized that the RFID technology we relied upon to track the shelf life of street signs would require a specialized manufacturing process that called for a new set of web and mobile applications.

Subsequently, we are currently working on creating four products simultaneously.

For decreasing time spent on sign inspections:

Web app for municipalities
Mobile app for municipalities

For tracking shelf life of street signs:

Web app for sign manufacturers
Mobile app for manufacturers

There are still many things we'll have to verify with additional user interviews and tests. For now, our goal is to ship the product with the hope of getting wider user feedback so that we can continue to refine and improve our products.

Main Flows

Desktop

As someone who manages the maintenance of street signs, I want to be informed about the condition of a street sign quickly and reliably so that I can determine which signs need to be serviced.

Mobile

As someone who physically maintains street signs, I want to be able to track my progress quickly and easily so that my manager knows what has been done.

Impact

On average, our new application allowed City staff to install signs and digitally record this action in just 1 minute. The leading competitor's application took City staff 8 minutes to digitally record the same action, and the old paper and pen method took almost 13 minutes to record the same action.

What does this all mean?

It means our new application allows City staff to work almost 87.5 times faster than the old software and almost 92 times faster than when using paper and pen.

Reflection

While all apps have been designed with high-contrast text and easy to tap CTA's, additional research is required to truly understand all the environments in which street sign installations/inspections/decommissions are conducted. I would love to go back and explore the different types of environments more (well-lit, dark, or noisy/distracting) so that users in the field have no trouble completing their tasks quickly and accurately.

Additionally, City staff are usually carrying a multitude of tools while working out in the field and asking them to carry two devices in addition to their toolsets will likely be a burden. As such, a wearable device, rather than a traditional device may provide a better channel for these users to interact with our software.