DuPont

MCI Semiconductor Insights

project

MCI Semiconductor Insights

deliverables

UX Strategy, wireframes, user flows, visuals, and prototype

client

DuPont

timeframe

Spring 2022

role

Senior UX Designer.

tools

Figma, Miro, Microsoft Axure.

Challenge and Problem Statement

The DuPont MCI Semiconductor Insights web application was created due to the difficulty that their semiconductor group had with gathering data needed to make integral business decisions. This application scraped data from the web and allowed users to manually upload data, at which point the system would generate data visualizations in the dashboard system for the end users. This allowed the analysts to make more informed choices quicker.

Goals

Support features requested by stakeholders Lowered times spent making data visualizations Automate data collection efforts

Research & Analysis

Interviewing stakeholders and several members from the semiconductor group, we found how business analysts were currently doing this work. They would go to various competitor and customer websites and review financial disclosure documents, compiling asset and inventory data by hand. They would then take this data and create charts and graphs to determine course of action, eg to support new facilities, increase production, but materials, etc. Working with engineering, we determined that it would be possible to scrape these websites and financial disclosures for the data and automate this process.

Findings

"Researching and compiling all this data takes months and by that time markets can shift unexpectedly"

"Charts are difficult to make by hand"

"We should be able to export data for reports and portability"

Working with analysts by interviewing them and finding out integral pain points, we started creating a basic user flow on how analysts would view the data. A good portion of the application was automated in the background, scraping data and then feeding these results into data visualization scripts to generate charts and graphs. This required collaboration with stakeholders, project managers, and engineering to get the correct mix and create a seamless application.

User Flow

Dupont semiconductor user flow

When interviewing stakeholders an interesting problem came up. For a long time, they found it difficult to compare data from one company to another. We determined that a grid would be the best way for us to display that data, where factors such as sales, gross margin, r&d expenditure, and others could be compared. We allowed users to select the companies they wished to compare to each other, up to five, further allowing for custom analytics.

Wireframes

tagging system start page
tagging system start page
tagging search overlay
tagging system search
tagging system select
click on images to zoom in

Showing the various trend lines, users would be able to make better business decisions on how to allocate resources. We also determined that we needed to add increased functionality to this system, so that the users could export the data sets into documents that they could present to other stakeholders and business leaders.

Test: Validation, Usability, Feedback

Project was put on hold due to shifting business priorities. Never got out of initial planning and wireframing stages.