Digital Twin For Mining

Client: Willow Digital

Role: UX Designer

The Twin

The Digital Twin for Mining is a constraints-based digital twin to prioritise, measure and mitigate production impacts for Mining. It visualises in near real-time a replica of your fixed plant operations, and provides data-backed insights to better manage work and target sustaining capital improvements.

The Design Challenge

I was brought in very early into the development of the Twin - This meant at the outset we had determined a value broadly speaking to the mining industry for a product like this, however had not as yet determined specific users, use-cases or change management/other considerations as to how a product like this should be tailored and delivered to realise maximum value - this constituted the bulk of discovery work.

Additionally on the UI side, the challenge was to deliver data and insights in a meaningful way to a flexible range of user types; ultimately we’re trying to tell a story using data to aid decision making.

The Approach: Design

The aim of the game was to tell a story, but in a way that appealed to and was understandable to a wide audience user base, so that Miners, Executives, Engineers and Specialist could all look at the same screen and understand what they needed to know to engage in decision making conversations with the others.

This meant we needed to deliver SIMPLE INSIGHTS whilst providing enough DETAIL so that this story could be conveyed to multiple user types.

Below is an example of how we deliver an insight about if now is a good time for Maintenance to Occur and below that, the diagram shows how that insight relates to material flow within a system and some detail as to the rate of material flow. This is meaningful to many mining user types on multiple levels and provides the detail required to support human conversations.