1. Overview

1.1. Introduction

CMCC is a Chinese state-owned telecommunication company that pr

ovides mobile voice and multimedia services through its nationwide m

obile telecommunications network. As of Nov 2012, China Mobile is the

world's largest mobile phone operator by subscribers with about 703 mi

llion.

Base Station Electricity Management System is a kind of product design

ed for the mobile operator to manage the rent and the utility bills of th

e base stations and it can automatically be used to pay for the electric

bills, customize management contracts and check data instead of wo

rking manually by workers. Also the system helps the company to redu

ce unnecessary energy consumption.

1.2. Problems

1. How to improve the experience when dealing with the massive infor

mation and data? For instance, the users of the system have to enter

mass of initial data due to the initialization of the system, thus the desig

n must increase the working efficiency without reducing the accuracy.

What's more, the large amount of workload which contains the calcul

ation, statistics and analysis can be so crushing to the staff that the syst

em should improve this situation.

2. How to use the system to supervise and control the staff’s work, redu

cing the misoperation and the lost by leaking cause of waste? Through

the design of the limits of authority and the office automaiton, the syst

em will make clear of everyone's responsibility and make it possible for t

he managers to check the work and supervise the process.

3. How to optimaize the process of management with the informatizati

on and automation that the system can offer?

4. How to use the system to reduce the cost and the unnessary energy

consumption concretely? If we want the system to pick out

the abnormal data automatically.

1.3. My work

1. Accomplished the related industry research such as market survey, c

ompetitive product analysis and study the telecommunication knowled

ge which is required during the project in one week.

2. Conducted the user research work, containing user interview, focus

group, user psycology & behavior analysis, questionnaire and the result

statistics in one week.

3. Build the whole framework of the system and designed the user interf

ace and interaction of the system's two main parts with 89 functions. T

he product altogether experienced 4 iterations after every usability test

ing which were all finished by myself in one month.

4. Conduct the whole usability testing, worked out all the documents a

nd materials. Tested 8 users with all the 8 function modules, 28 submod

ules, 144 task chains. Found 46 usability problems in total and revised t

he design by iterations and giving other feasible solutions.

5. Provided a solution for calculating and examining the abnormal dat

a in the system. Proposed solutions for the management process of the

company by using the system.

1.4. Methods

Competitive analysis, user interview, demands analysis, focus group, co

ntextual inquiry, field study, questionnaires, information synthesis, brainst

orming, wireframes, mathematical modeling, data analysis, prototypin

g, usability study and testing

1.5. Tools

Photoshop, MindManager, Axure, SPSS, Visio, Matlab

2. Research

2.1. Market requirements analysis

As our product was special for the particular company and was design

ed according to the specific demands of our client, CMCC, the meth

ods I used during the market requirements analysis was not competitive

analysis or any other search methods, but did users interview instead, f

or the users were all experts in this field and I could acquire useful infor

mation directly. I looked through massive papers and searched relate

d information on the internet. The information I achieved showed the b

asic conditions of these products in China and abroad.

2.3. Users interview

It took me about a week to interview the project manager, developers,

real users and the product salers. The main purposes is firstly to learn m

ore information about the project and related field, secondly to master

the framework and the essential functions of the system. After that, I re

built the framework of the old version myself.

2.2. Preliminary usability study

This project had lasted for months before I participated in and I synthesi

zed the feedback from my colleagues. The comment was very bad an

d there was a significant problem in saling, delaying the whole schedul

e of the company. I decided to conduct a usability test at once in ord

er to find out the defects of the previous version. Then I revised the fram

ework, caming up with a new one which was more reasonable and m

ore logical.

2.4. Focus group

The focus group contained project manager, developer, UX designer,

front-end web developer the product saler and the target user from C

MCC. The six people discussed and put forward their suggestions abou

t the new scenario.