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Machine Configuration
Unifying complex industrial workflows across a global product ecosystem.
RESEARCH AT A GLANCE3
UX TEAM MEMBERS
19
DOCUMENTED INTERVIEWS
5
Countries Represented
CLIENT
Komatsu
ROLE
UX Lead
TEAM
3 UX Designers
METHODOLOGIES
Project Management
User Interviews
Contextual Inquiry
Research Synthesis
Usability Testing
Executive Summary
The Challenge: Komatsu's global operations relied on a fragmented ecosystem of product-specific tools for machine configuration. Deployment and System Engineers navigated inconsistent workflows and labor-intensive processes to configure devices, install software, and manage system settings. These inefficiencies increased cognitive load, introduced opportunities for human error, and complicated deployments across global mining operations.
The Solution: As UX Design Lead, I led a team of two designers to research and design a unified Machine Configuration experience as part of Komatsu's broader digital ecosystem strategy. Through global user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability research, we identified opportunities to streamline complex workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and establish a scalable, consistent experience across products and devices.
The Impact: Our research-driven design introduced more efficient configuration workflows, reusable settings, and improved system feedback. Subsequent usability testing showed higher System Usability Scale (SUS) scores than legacy tools, while qualitative feedback highlighted greater user confidence and reduced anxiety around configuration and deployment tasks.
My Role: Leading a Global UX Research Initiative
Creating alignment, structure, and accountability across a distributed team
As the UX Design Lead for Machine Configuration, I led a three-person UX team to investigate existing configuration workflows and define a user-centered direction for a unified enterprise experience.
The initiative presented considerable organizational complexity. Our stakeholders were distributed globally, the product scope was still evolving, and configuration processes varied significantly across systems and applications.
My responsibility was to bring structure to that ambiguity.
Working alongside two UX designers, I coordinated the planning, scheduling, execution, and synthesis of our user interviews. This included identifying relevant subject-matter experts, aligning research activities with project objectives, coordinating participation across international time zones, and helping the team translate research findings into actionable design opportunities.
I also worked with Product Strategy and Engineering stakeholders to set shared expectations for research, especially in an environment where technical requirements had traditionally dominated product decisions.
My leadership focus was to ensure that our research was more than a collection of observations. It needed to provide the team with evidence, direction, and a defensible foundation for product decisions.
Discovery: Understanding a Global Ecosystem
Bringing the voices of engineers into the design process
To understand the current configuration experience, our team developed a research approach that combined qualitative interviews, contextual inquiry, and quantitative usability benchmarking.
Our broader research initiative encompassed more than 12 interviews and contextual inquiries. The participant-tracking artifact shown here documents nine interview sessions with ten subject-matter experts across five countries: Australia, the United States, South Africa, Peru, and Brazil.
The participants represented a broad spectrum of technical responsibilities, including Deployment Engineers, Application Engineers, Product Support Specialists, Technical Support Managers, and Global Support Supervisors.
This diversity was intentional. Machine Configuration needed to support people with different levels of technical expertise, responsibilities, and operational contexts. Understanding those distinctions was critical to designing a solution that could scale across the organization.
Building a structured research operation
Rather than treating interviews as isolated conversations, we organized participant information in a shared research tracker that documented each person's responsibilities, experience, location, commonly used tools, and working environment.
This gave the team visibility into who we were learning from and helped us consider whether our research reflected the diversity of roles and environments the product needed to support.
It also helped us coordinate as a distributed team and maintain consistency across interviews.
Research artifact: Our team's participant matrix documenting interview coordination, user roles, locations, technical responsibilities, tools, and working environments across global operations.
Studying workflows in their operational context
Our interviews went beyond asking participants what they liked or disliked about existing tools. We explored how they completed configuration and deployment tasks, which applications and systems they depended on, where manual intervention was required, and what happened when workflows failed.
The research revealed a key distinction: although engineers often worked with similar technical concepts, their experience configuring different products could vary substantially.
Some users worked primarily in remote support environments, while others performed on-site deployment and troubleshooting. Some relied on specialized command-line tools, while others navigated multiple applications, servers, and file-transfer mechanisms.
These differences introduced complexities that a purely interface-focused redesign would have overlooked.
By understanding the work surrounding the software, we were better positioned to identify opportunities for meaningful improvements rather than merely cosmetic changes.
Research Synthesis: Turning Feedback into Design Priorities
Finding patterns across different systems, roles, and regions
With our interviews complete, the next challenge was turning a large volume of technical feedback into actionable insights.
Working collaboratively, we organized participant responses into an affinity-mapping exercise, grouping related observations into recurring themes and identifying areas where multiple users experienced similar friction.
One particularly revealing interview question was:
"Are there any steps that you wish were simpler, faster, or more transparent?"
This open-ended question encouraged participants to identify inefficiencies in their own terms rather than react to solutions we had already imagined.
The responses revealed recurring problems with repetitive configuration work, inconsistent procedures, limited deployment visibility, and manual file handling.
We organized this feedback into broader themes, including streamlining software development automation, improving configuration processes, and addressing system configuration and deployment challenges.
Research artifact: Participant responses to a single interview question, first organized by participant and then clustered into related themes to reveal recurring friction and opportunities for improvement.
Four themes that informed our UX direction
1. Inconsistent workflows created unnecessary cognitive overhead
Participants described differences in installation, configuration, and deployment procedures between products. In some cases, users had to remember specialized commands, file locations, and step sequences to accomplish similar tasks.
Design opportunity: Create consistent interaction patterns and guided workflows while preserving the familiar technical concepts engineers already understood.
2. Repetitive manual tasks limited efficiency
Engineers described configuring units individually, performing repetitive installation procedures, and manually moving information or files between systems.
These activities became increasingly burdensome when applied across larger groups of machines.
Design opportunity: Introduce reusable configuration patterns, bulk operations, and automation opportunities that reduce repetitive work without sacrificing control.
3. Limited feedback reduced confidence and transparency
Participants wanted clearer indicators of deployment progress, synchronization status, errors, and which steps were complete or still outstanding.
Limited visibility made troubleshooting harder and could complicate communication with customers and other teams.
Design opportunity: Make system states, progress, errors, and configuration changes more visible and actionable throughout the experience.
4. Environmental and technical constraints complicated deployment
Remote connectivity, cybersecurity restrictions, file-transfer limitations, and differences between applications created additional friction.
These findings reminded us that industrial UX must accommodate real-world operating conditions, not merely ideal system behavior.
Design opportunity: Account for connectivity constraints, configuration resilience, and the dependencies that influence how deployments are performed.
Translating Research into Product Strategy
Moving from what users said to what the experience needed to enable
The synthesis helped us connect individual frustrations to broader experience requirements. Instead of treating every reported issue as an isolated feature request, we used the recurring patterns to inform a more cohesive design direction.
Research Insights
Repetitive device-by-device configuration
Inconsistent procedures across applications
Difficulty understanding deployment status
Manual data entry & file handling
Risk of interrupted work or lost changes
Complex steps that were difficult for new users to understand
UX Direction
Bulk configuration & reusable settings
Unified workflows & familiar design patterns
Clear progress indicators, validation, & feedback
Consolidated inputs & opportunities for automation
Autosave & more resilient interaction patterns
Guided workflows, clearer terminology, and contextual information
This distinction was important to our design strategy.
We weren't simply collecting feature requests. We were identifying the underlying interaction problems that a scalable enterprise solution needed to solve.
Our proposed direction sought to reduce cognitive overhead, eliminate unnecessary repetition, and improve confidence in high-consequence configuration activities.
These opportunities also aligned with the broader product vision: a unified, role-based interface that could support configuration management across multiple machine devices and product environments.
As the UX Lead, I helped connect these findings to design priorities and cross-functional discussions, ensuring that user needs remained visible alongside business requirements and technical constraints.
What This Research Enabled
Creating a foundation for design decisions
The research gave our team a stronger basis for evaluating the proposed Machine Configuration experience.
It provided greater visibility into differences across regional workflows, identified recurring friction points, and established a shared language for discussing usability challenges with Product Strategy and Engineering.
The findings informed our exploration of consolidated configuration workflows, bulk operations, familiar interaction patterns, autosave behavior, and clearer system feedback.
Just as importantly, the process demonstrated the value of involving users early in complex technical initiatives.
By engaging engineers as collaborators rather than simply recipients of a finished interface, we were better positioned to challenge assumptions and design around the realities of their work.
My Leadership Reflection
Leading the Machine Configuration research effort strengthened my conviction that effective UX leadership is fundamentally about enabling teams to make better decisions.
Coordinating research across global regions required planning, adaptability, clear communication, and an understanding of how different stakeholders contributed to the product experience.
Working alongside two designers also reinforced the importance of creating an environment where team members could contribute to research, explore complex problems, and participate in translating evidence into a shared design direction.
The experience helped me grow beyond solving individual design problems toward leading a coordinated effort that connected user needs, team execution, and business strategy.
For me, the greatest value of this work was turning fragmented technical knowledge into a shared understanding of the problem—and using that understanding to guide a more purposeful product experience.
