The Challenge

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Drilling is a lot more complicated than people outside of the industry think. When you are underground, knowing where the drill bit is, is easier said than done. The driller uses machinery on the rig to drill wells at multiple angles rather than just vertically. As a result, wells can be separated by mere feet and create an underground formation that looks like a pile of spaghetti.
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A significant safety concern is keeping track of existing wells (subject/reference well) and how close a driller can drill a new well.
Hitting an existing well can result in environmental disaster and death.

The Process

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I had a steep learning curve with this project; you need to understand geoscience to understand drilling. Fortunately for me, many of my colleagues were actual geoscientists, petroleum engineers, drillers, and ex roughnecks. After many conversations with subject matter experts, I created a high-level app flow to diagram the who, what, where, and when things needed to happen in the application.

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Once I understood all of the systems and users that will be involved in the app, I sat with my team and came up with the dynamic model. A dynamic model is a diagram that shows the user's workflow related to the application setup.

Since this app integrated with existing ones, there was a strong need for taxonomy documentation for data mapping.

Using the dynamic model as a map of what states needed to be built, the team and I decided what to work on based on priority, not order. Utilizing this method also helped me stay a sprint ahead of development.

With a solid information architecture base, we perfected our UI with feedback from users with a series of rapid prototyping user testing.

The Impact

With this app, a driller can predict where existing wells are more accurately. This was once a very time-consuming manual process with lots of room for error.