Meridian Grid
Energy
2024
Field data a utility's crews finally trust and use.
Two thousand field engineers, a tablet each and a dashboard nobody opened. We redesigned it for gloves, glare and patchy signal.
Client
Meridian Grid
Services
Product · Data design
Duration
10 weeks
Year
2024
Overview
Meridian maintains distribution networks across a region the size of a small country. Its crews had tablets and a dashboard, and used neither — the paper run sheet was faster and did not need a signal.
We redesigned the field platform around the three decisions a crew actually makes at a site, and made every one of them work offline.
+64%
Daily active crews
−22min
Per site visit
100%
Offline capable
The work
The challenge
The dashboard had been built for the control room and handed to the field. It assumed a keyboard, a stable connection and someone with time to read. At a substation in the rain, none of that holds.
What we did
We spent the first fortnight in vans rather than workshops. The redesign that came out of it is built around three questions: what is wrong here, what did the last crew do, and what am I allowed to switch off.
Everything is sized for gloved hands, tested at full brightness against glare, and written to local storage first so a job completes whether or not there is signal. Sync is a background detail, not a step the crew performs.
The outcome
Daily active crews rose by nearly two thirds within a quarter, and average time on site fell by 22 minutes — most of it recovered from the paperwork that used to happen back at the depot.
