Using Job Characteristics to Inform Interface Design for Industrial Maintenance Procedures

Maintenance of industrial equipment is done by fitters, electricians and other maintainers. For safety and quality control, maintainers must follow procedures; historically these have been paper-based. Asset-owning organisations seek to transition maintainers to digital platforms. However, there are limited studies on the potential impact of digitisation on maintenance work and the maintainers that perform it. Our challenge is to identify interface design considerations that support the safe and reliable execution of work. We looked specifically at maintenance procedures and conducted semi-structured interviews with process-plant maintainers. Thematic analysis identified eight factors influencing maintainers’ perceptions towards using digital technologies in their work. We map these factors to three categories, work identity, agency and community. These categories are consistent with concepts from the Job Characteristics Model (JCM). The contribution of this work is the relevance of job characteristics in guiding user interface design for maintainers, for which we make a number of recommendations.

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