Making it easier for nuclear engineers to digitally handle nuclear waste
SKB, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company, is engaged in one of Sweden’s largest environmental protection projects. Our task is to deal with all the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants in Sweden in a safe way.
SKB had problems with their digital systems for management of nuclear waste since these were MS-DOS based and lacked a graphical user interface. This was a big problem when hiring new employees as only people that had worked in the system for years knew how to work it efficiently.
I was tasked with gathering user insights to inform us of how a graphical user interface should work.
The special part of this project was that the users (nuclear engineers) had to handle an enormous complexity on daily basis, and in order to understand their needs I also needed to understand that complexity. So I got some physics books and started studying radiation.
Based this new-found knowledge, field studies were conducted together with interviews in order to create a prototype that I could user test. Based on the complexity of this environment, I had to do several iterations of user tests with the engineers until I fully understood how the physics of everything worked.
The result was a prototype that was based as a starting point for translating the MS-DOS system to a graphical user interface.
Because of NDA, no imagery can be shared.
