ehsAI Case Study

Disrupting paper and pencil with an AI web app

All EHS professionals deconstruct documents by hand with paper and pencil. Moving to digital would be disruptive as most EHS professionals were afraid of or unfamiliar with AI.

Many types of compliance documentation from all levels of governments

One huge challenge was digitizing compliance documents. EHS legal requirements can come from all levels of government (local, state, federal) in all types of formats. The document formatting can be diverse ranging from digital to typewriter-written to hand-written, including tables, diagrams, and images.

Personas - who will need this product?

Research indicated four primary EHS personas. Most would want to use the ehsAI app and some would want to purchase the ehsAI app for their EHS team:

• Consultant
• Manager
• Vice President of EHS
• Auditor

Competitive analysis forewarns of failure

Competitive analysis showed that what we were doing had been attempted before, although all attempts had been abandoned due to the complexity of the problems. Friction points were:

• The diverse nature of compliance documents
• The difficulty in analyzing the data; words, tables, diagrams
• Deconstruction with paper and pencil the norm
• Integrating a user friendly interface

Our team believed we could forge ahead with innovation and creativity using AI to solve many issues.

Single document deconstruction is the red route

Red routes are the primary tasks the users want to complete the most often. For the ehsAI app the main red route was the single document upload and analysis flow. EHS professionals preferred to process one document at a time from start to finish. Other tasks like document management were secondary in importance.

A user flow to keep the task simple

Client feedback affirmed the single document upload and analysis flow to be the most important. Later more tasks and features were added to the user flows.

Four primary design patterns

After generating different ideas about grid and screen structures, I settled comprising the user interface of four primary design patterns. This informs the design of each new template and keeps a consistent feel for the user as they navigate throughout the app.

Wireframes to inform the placement of features

Wireframes were designed to help visualize the information architecture. I prioritized the red routes and organized the workspace of the review steps in way to keep as much of app UI out of the way of the compliance document view.

The document journey went from a customer upload through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) text extractor into the ehsAI review tool stepper. This meant the ehsAI app was rebuilding the entire document from layout and text to formatting in order for the app, the AI, and the customer to work together analyzing the data for compliance requirements and other important details.

Finding creative ways to interact with columns

For the most part the AI could accurately detect column text structures. However, for the times when it could not, I needed to come up with UI that helped define columns and accurately portray the reading order of the columns. I created a cutting tool to allow the user to slice up columns both vertically and horizontally and numbering UI to determine the reading order.

Remote user testing

Remote user testing was done using online meetings using screen sharing that were recorded. Some key insights revolved around the Hierarchy Step where the users were assessing the AI evaluations of the document's citation hierarchy. Three main pain points were synonymous across the testing observations and user feedback:

• Citation hierarchy was one of the steps that took the most amount of time to work on
• Citation hierarchy is the most complicated with troublesome documents
• It can be hard to remember the hierarchy depth number over long text or across pages

Product design needs a solid foundation of well-defined branding

Although the ehsAI logo was established before I joined the team, I expanded the branding by defining and adding the mission statement, values, tone of voice, character, app colours, typography, and custom icon set to keep the experience of the brand cohesive.

Adding some colour and fun to compliance document processing wait times

We were honoured to have the very talented designer Nikoo Farvardin intern with us while she was finishing her studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She created a library of illustrations that radiated with colour and spunk bringing out the fun part of our brand. We had two points in the user flow of working on a long documents where the processing wait times could sometimes be lengthy. Later I animated her two of Nikoo's illustrations: one for preparing the document for the review steps and a second for processing the document at the end of the review steps.

From 0–1 in 6 months

Our whole team was instrumental in quickly bringing to life a disruptive technology that upends paper and pen with AI/ML by simplifying complex AI interactions and quickly yielding accurate results. We went from a concept to fully functioning B2B SaaS in six months. From there we continued to improve and add features.

Time and cost savings of 80%

Designs that allow Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) professionals to work with AI to deconstruct regulations and permits into useable compliance information saving significant time and money while being more accurate.

Accomplishing something that had never been successful previously

Although others had tried and failed, the team at ehsAI successfully built an app that could upload and import compliance documents and give EHS professionals a fast and accurate output. Thanks to top notch leadership and a dedicated hard-working team.

There's a sense of satisfaction and gratitude when customers validate the goals

Thanks to all our customers for contributing to our journey of designing and building. And thanks to my awesome teammates for the valuable feedback, suggestions, and inspiration. Here is some of the praise we got from our users.

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