Front-End Web/Mobile (UI/UX)

Park Industries builds high-precision machines for stone and metal fabricators. With over 15,700 machines sold, the company has become North America’s largest manufacturer of stoneworking machinery, with the metal industry not far behind. Part of Park’s success has been driven by investing in state-of-the-art technology in its machines as well as expanding its breadth of digital solutions.

Park Industries wanted to develop a digital solution that allows its customer to make the most of their fabricating machines. The solution, called Park IQ^TM, would provide real-time visibility into the workings of these machines so users could operate more efficiently and productively.

“We wanted to leverage data from the machines and present it to the customer in a way that allows them to make decisions based on what’s happening within their business or on a specific machine,” said David Lloyd, Director of Information Technology at Park Industries. “It’s something our customers have asked for, and it’s the first product on the market with
its comprehensive capabilities.”

Creating the solution would mean capturing vast amounts of data from individual machines throughout the country; pushing that information up into a customer-segregated, cloud-based data lake; segmenting and analyzing the data per machine and user; and then displaying it on an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard instantaneously.

Though the company had a general idea of what it wanted the end product to be, it relied on Capmation’s expertise in UI/UX design to help better define its vision and bring the feedback from its Voice of Customer group to life.

One of the first steps of the Park IQ^TM project was creating an easy-to-use dashboard that would be used by its customers. Park Industries formed a Voice of Customer group made up of various-sized organizations within its target market and used the group’s feedback to help conceptualize the design.

Heading up this discussion was Capmation’s UI/UX designer. David’s team leaned heavily on her experience and recommendations to transform customers’ ideas and feedback into a tangible and user-friendly dashboard design.

“She was the most critical person at that point in the project because she had a great approach to gathering ideas and providing different ways that we could display the data or navigate through the system. We made a lot of decisions just based on her experience and recommendations,” he said.

One of the primary criteria in creating the design was keeping it simple to use. The company didn’t want the product to require any customer training. With an extensive list of product features included in the application, achieving simplicity was no small task.

“When you think about all of the data coming off of these machines, we really had to focus on making it easy for customers so they know what’s the most important thing for them to see. Capmation’s designer helped us get there by creating visuals at each stage with different design options. There’s no better way to gather customer feedback,” he explained.

David said the design tool Capmation used also accelerated the development time because the developers were able to easily recreate exactly what was designed for the front- end user interface.

The time frame from prototyping to market-ready release exceeded expectations.

“We developed this solution faster than expected. Capmation’s team played a really big part of that with their understanding of technology and their ability to very quickly understand our desired end state. Because they were able to ramp up quickly, it allowed us to get to market much faster,” said David.

Market validation at the beta stage has been extremely positive, and David attributes much of the project’s success to a strong partnership with Capmation.

“Their commitment and their ability to bring the talent that they did was a big part of it. They went above and beyond to help us get this product to market as quickly as we did. And, on top of that, they’re just great people to work with,” he concluded.

• UI/UX expertise transforms Voice of Customer feedback into user-friendly dashboard
• Simple interface requires no user training
• Positive user experience translates into successful market validation