Risk Assessment Cards
(UX Research + Graphic Design)
I re-designed the Hazard Identification Risk Assessment Cards (HIRAc’s) at the Burns Harbor mill.
The Problem
HIRAc’s are supposed to be filled out by work crews together before starting any work for the day on a project so that everyone is on the same page about potential hazards and what to do in the event of an accident. This communal action of awareness is proven to dramatically reduce the chance of fatal accidents. However, mill-wide completion of these forms was low, averaging less than 25% in some departments.
The Goal
Increase completion of pre-work hazard assessments.
The Impact
After a month of use, the completion of the new HIRAc’s had increased by 30% mill-wide.
Research
Interviews
During the incident investigation interviews following an accident, the safety department learned that the work team had not completed their HIRAc’s prior to work. In these interviews, we learned that the Project was behind schedule and the workers had decided to skip what, in their experience, was a lengthy and tedious exercise. Following a discussion about this with my supervisor, I proposed a re-design of the document based on what I had heard specifically about the risk assessment experience.
First Draft
This is what the original card looked like. The original design repeated questions and added friction to the completion process to ensure that the user took their time completing the card.
I worked with a safety officer to pair down the content on the card to what was essential and then re-arranged the elements based on the insights from incident interviews.
A/B Testing
We shared the first draft and the original side by side with safety managers in the different departments, and asked for their feedback about the flow of these two cards. They gave helpful feedback pertaining to the accessibility of the type legibility and writing space.
Contextual Inquiry
I asked to go to training to better understand how people are told to use the cards. I participated in the 8 hour training session where we learned to identify common and unconventional workplace hazards specific to the mill.
I also asked to go to a department that did things and shadow on the job to observe interactions about this card. There I shadowed millwrights making repairs to a large machine that rolls slabs of steel into thin sheets over a quarter a mile. This meant the area that needed to be inspected before work was very spread out. I experienced first hand how the order of questions on the card can impact how long before work can actually begin.
Users and Needs
In both the training and the shadowing, I asked some of the workers what there thoughts were about the card (they were using the originals in both of these contexts).
These safety managers, experienced millwrights, and interns identified common pain points of:
“Type is too small to easily read”
“There is not enough space to write some of the answers”
“Some of the questions are irrelevant to my job”
“The layout is confusing”
One of the more unique answers I received was that one younger worker felt like some the more senior workers in his department had difficulty reading the small and tight type on the card and in lieu of complaining about this difficulty, perpetuated a culture of dismissing the HIRAc completion altogether.
So, I distilled these answers and experiences into the goals of making the card more legible and arranging the content into the most straightforward order.
Final Design
Following a couple more iterations, this was the final design that I proposed:
Results
After we finalized the next draft in the Safety Department, I printed out hundreds of prototypes and we gave them to a departments with low completion rate.
Safety managers reported higher engagement with the new HIRAc’s, and we created a third and final draft.
After a week, we expanded the experiment mill wide and saw a 30% increase in completion after a month.
Word spread through the union and we received requests from safety managers at nearby mills about using the new cards.
Takeaways
Type and legibility have a profound impact on accessibility and safety.
Empathy is as much of an action as it is a skill. Sometimes you literally need to walk that mile in someone else’s steel toed boots.