SIEMENS

Beate Schwichtenberg is sitting in an operating room and looking as if she’s just landed in Papua New Guinea. Everything is so strange here! She can recognize the surgeon — but all those instrument operators, assistants, anesthesiologists... She’s absorbed by what she sees: The emergency surgery room at this university clinic looks to her almost like a carpenter’s workshop, what with all the drilling and bolting going on. Like a shadow, Schwichtenberg moves around with hospital staff, taking notes on everything they do, every unwritten rule, every minor process.

Schwichtenberg doesn't really belong here, because she's not a doctor. However, as a usability expert, it's her job to watch people at work and then develop systems that facilitate their tasks on the basis of her observations. She learned how to do this by studying cognitive science at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). Her colleagues in the Usability Lab at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Munich, Germany, studied similar subjects — psychology, computer science, communication design, etc. — generally with a focus on human-machine interaction. Today special programs with names like Human-Computer Interaction, Usability Engineering, and Human Factors are on offer. "That's not surprising," says Dr. Martin Scheurer, Head of the CT Usability Lab. "Human beings and the way they interact with computers and machines largely determine how productive a company will be."

That's why systems must be well adapted to people and how they work, rather than the other way around. "We need to understand users' needs," says Schwichtenberg. "Otherwise, it's impossible to design systems that fit in with a specific working environment." To this end, Schwichtenberg goes into the field, works with ethnographic techniques, and tries to tap into the implicit knowledge of the "natives," as she refers to workers. "You need this knowledge to analyze things that are taken for granted and identify behaviors and word choices, for example," Schwichtenberg says. Her specialty is observing German hospitals. Over the last six years, she's visited 40 of them.

Schwichtenberg’s reference to Papua New Guinea as a metaphor is not as exaggerated as it sounds. She studied under Prof. Edwin Hutchins in the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD — and Hutchins, a cognitive ethnographer, studied the natives of the island nation of Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. He later applied his methods to his work with the U.S. Marines and his analyses of company cultures. “Basically, the workings of a hospital are as foreign to us as Papua New Guinea,” Schwichtenberg says. Every culture has rules that all its members are familiar with but that outsiders find difficult to understand.

Together with experts from Siemens Healthcare, Schwichtenberg and her colleagues incorporated the results of their studies into a high-tech hospital administration system. The system has an intuitive operating concept tailored to the typical work habits and work context of all the professional groups at a hospital — from admissions staff to surgery coordinators and medication monitors. “The software’s interface needs to be familiar to all users,” says Schwichtenberg. “If an administrator likes to work with post-it notes because he or she needs to take lots of notes, the software can be made to do this.” In other words, it is tailored to the normal work practices of occupational groups in hospitals.

Consider the following example. Hospital stays are often planned weeks in advance and occupancy managers are responsible for allocating beds, scheduling examinations and operations, and ensuring that enough beds remain available for emergencies and that distribution is fair. All of this is meant to achieve a good occupancy balance among the various stations. During her analyses, Schwichtenberg paid close attention to how the hospital’s occupancy manager worked and which types of documents and tools he used. Today, the administration system she worked on combines all this information in an application that displays a graphic overview of the number of occupied beds, generates a calendar for patient admissions, and includes a search function for available beds.

Users only need to know how to operate the application they need for their own work. The system’s modules cover areas such as outpatient administration, surgery, and patient data management. The system also links the clinical and administrative sections of a hospital. “The clinical departments deal with people — the patients,” Schwichtenberg explains. “Administrators don’t; they just work with case numbers.” The software thus networks these two completely different areas.

An App for Train Conductors. Usability experts are constantly exploring unfamiliar worlds. One of Schwichtenberg’s colleagues, Martin Kessner, recently observed conductors in the German railway system. Kessner examined a range of situations and tried to determine which types of applications could make the conductors’ work easier. He’s now using what he learned to design a smartphone app for staff in modern trains — for example, trains of the ICx high-speed fleet that will be introduced in the near future. Kessner discovered that conductors do not like having to carry several devices as they move through a train that is up to 400 meters long. They also complained that even with the devices, they still can’t do everything they need to do.

"With the right smartphone app, conductors could do much more on the move," says Kessner. For instance, a new app would allow them to make announcements even when they're not in the conductor’s compartment. They could also communicate with one another, adjust climate controls, and intervene in the door control system. Up until now, all these things had to be done via a console in the conductor’s compartment. But with the new app, a train control system could also send information about defective toilets or unlocked doors straight to a conductor’s smartphone. In other words, a train and its conductor could "talk" more or less in real time.

Working on the Move. Creating apps for the working world — that’s the goal of Siemens’ “Mobility First” approach. The idea is to combine the key tasks performed by an occupational group into one app — be it in a hospital, on a train, or in a factory. Siemens is now focusing intensely on the latter, with mobile applications for production facilities. For example, it is testing a prototype called Sinumerik Mobile at its Test Application Center in Erlangen. The center serves as a lab for machine tools that work with Sinumerik controls. Sinumerik Mobile is an app that monitors and diagnoses electronically-controlled machine tools.

The app enables employees to control machines conveniently via their smartphones. “However, the main thing is that the app offsets certain machine limitations,” says Corporate Technology researcher Christian Butter, who is managing the app project in conjunction with Uwe Scheuermann from Siemens Industry Motion Control. Sinumerik technology is used in computer numerically-controlled milling machines, lathes, and die-casting and injection-molding units all over the world. But up until now, machine touch panels have not supported text in some languages, such as Chinese. But the new app allows users to send messages about errors to machines in any language. Their colleagues can then, for instance, immediately see in which mode a machine is operating. Previously, gaining such information was complicated. Thanks to the new app, it is becoming increasingly user-friendly.