Facilitating Statistical Analysis for LKAB : A User-friendly Digital Tool

Abstract: Conducting laboratory trials is crucial for the product and process development for a company active within the iron and steel industry. This is one way ensuring consistent high quality within the work and furthermore trustworthy trial results to present to internal and external clients. For a company with several laboratories involved in the process, a collaborative and supportive way of work is demanded. Having the laboratories using methods and routines of their own choice will likely contribute to several methods and routines being used. Evaluating their results may therefor add problems when it comes to consensus of conclusions from the trial results. This master thesis is about exploring solutions to develop a common work routine for trial results evaluations at LKAB laboratories during trials. It deals with the development of a prototype for a digital tool facilitating the employees through the process of statistical evaluations. The aim of the project was to develop this digital tool with high usability and ensuring ISO standards are incorporated toensure a safe, standardized, and common work routine to implement within LKAB:s laboratory work. The project followed a design process consisting of four main steps with a human/user- and activity centered approach. The steps were planning, context immersion, ideation and implementation. The involved phases were iterative and included methods such as workshops, braindrawing, user testing and prototyping. The goal was to understand how LKAB employees currently works with statistical evaluations and how to find and facilitate a common work way. To do this the user needs were at focus with relations to the functions that needed to be enabled by the tool. The users were involved during the entire process through co-designing and their ideas and opinions were highly considered within the final design. To ensure high usability in the prototype with a good user interface relevant theories in user experience and design principles were researched in the literature review. The project ended up resulting in an interactive web application prototype visualizing how such a tool for facilitating statistical evaluations could work and be implemented to ensure a common work way within LKAB. The prototype was limited to only showing the interactions of some of the steps involved in the statistical evaluations process dues to time limitation and other boundaries to the project. The design of the interface is associated to LKAB:s graphical profile and based on well-known design principles for designing a digital user interface.