In the heart of mineral processing innovations, Zoey Wang stands as the creative force reshaping mining user experiences at HPY Technology. As the UI designer of China's leading sensor-based ore sorting company, her role extends beyond conventional design boundaries, integrating the intricacies of hardware and software, efficiency, and sustainability in the mining industry.
Freedom Based on Needs: Design a User-Friendly HPY Cloud Computing
Zoey's responsibilities encompass a diverse spectrum, from crafting the machine's operational user interface to optimizing HPY's official website and HPY Cloud's design. In general, her job is to organize the wide range of sorting information collected by the machine in real-time and present it in a way that encourages proactive measures for optimizing production and equipment maintenance.
When asked about her favorite job aspect, Zoey said: “What I love most about my work is the constant challenge and freedom. They would come to me with a general need and gave my team and me the freedom of space to design.”
The timeline she spent working on these projects varies. Take HPY Cloud, for example; this is a scalable platform that delivers and stores essential data and analytics from the production line's digitally connected ore sorting machines to the supplier and customer. Optimizing the overall framework of HPY Cloud could take one to two months. At the same time, some of the equipment operational interfaces require 2-3 weeks. By now, she could adeptly manage the urgency of tight deadlines and has been instrumental in reshaping the company's digital landscape to one that provides easy leveraging of sorting information to better enrich the final product's purity over the past year and a half.
The most memorable experience for her was when she worked on the HPY Cloud Platform. To enhance its basic framework, she walked through the platform's transformation at every step, making user-friendly adjustments according to the user survey. Understanding user needs is a cornerstone of her approach, and this involves hands-on experiences such as visiting workshops and collaborating closely with engineers and customers to optimize the equipment's operation.
ESG Reporting in the New Mining Era
The “Cloud Computing” market in mining has been growing rapidly and is marked to be worth $1.4 trillion by 2027, according to GlobalData. However, the dynamic era of platform-as-a-service, staying ahead is a must, and that demands an unwavering commitment to learning about not just the newest technologies but what the industry is facing an urgent transition to a greener, more responsible way of doing mining practices needs.
As "Environmental, Social and Governance" (ESG) reports gradually become a requirement rather than a distant wish for mining companies, Zoey and her team have modified the system to increase the industry's mindfulness of the processing plant's improved ESG statistics. ESG-centered effort is seen from the first moment the user opens HPY Cloud: the old start-up page only provides the login information. On the other hand, the new interface shows the accumulated water resources saved. Data visualization is essential for providing the tools that enable users to assess their ore processing operations' environmental and social impact.
By embedding ESG-focused features directly into the ore sorting cloud platform's UI design, users can seamlessly integrate sustainable and responsible practices into their mining operations, contributing to the overall advancement of ESG goals in the mining industry. This approach aligns with the broader industry trend of leveraging technology to enhance sustainability and transparency.
However, this does not mean shoving every detail onto the platform. Visualizing data in an eye-pleasing way and logically highlighting the positive contributions and areas for improvement is essential, especially in motivating the mining industry to frequently check up on these useful analytics and reroute toward capacity building and decarbonization.
Customized Solution: Simplicity and Hi-Tech Visualization of Information
"The industry's future lies in simplicity," said Zoey. To her, this entails simplifying its production line towards sorting machines with high efficiency and less power consumption and streamlined, visually appealing platform interfaces that display critical information for engineers to make fact-based decisions. The previous home page displayed mostly numbers and tables, which might be difficult to read after a while; the new HPY Cloud utilizes mostly bar diagrams to emphasize the status change and uses appropriate colors to highlight malfunctioning types and warning signs.
As a woman in a male-dominated UI and mining world, Zoey didn't feel treated differently in her day-to-day job than her male counterparts in HPY Technology. If she has to recall instances of differences, it would be everyone has different visual interpretations of the word "hi-tech" – a word that has often arisen in the user survey when describing the interface's appearance.
"Making it look more 'hi-tech-ish,' they say," Zoey recalls this with a laugh. After some trial and error with this very ambiguous description that differs case-by-case, she and the team decide it's better to let the user decide what that vision looks like on their own, so they've allowed some room for users to alter the page according to their preference.
In 2024, as Zoey’s HPY team works to expand its outreach to the global market, its cloud computing is also currently undergoing major adjustments to accommodate the needs of mobile users and overseas clients.
Looking to the future, Zoey envisions a more user-centric and visually intuitive platform at HPY Technology. Her expectations include a paradigm shift towards simplicity. Like HPY, which strives to present a customized solution for individual mine process flow, Zoey has also advocated inclusivity, pushing for a customized interface visual and a comprehensive showcase of ore sorting machine developments, which evolve rapidly in the mining sector.
Zoey Wang's journey as the UI designer resonates with HPY's effort in the dynamic fusion of technology, sustainability, and inclusivity, propelling one another to the forefront of this new era of data-driven process optimization in the mining industry.