I can only discuss some general concepts regarding this project. We had a long running project with Lam Research, developing a program that would consolidate a number of applications under a single umbrella, which was designed to improve collaboration between process engineering teams. Lam Research is one of the largest microprocessor companies in the world, right under Intel and AMD. Process engineers continually refine processes for etching wafers in order to create custom chips. Being very rigorous work, it’s important to continually improve and collaborate with the other engineers, physicists and chemists etc. Due to the expense of equipment runs and consumables for testing wafers, Lam is constantly working to refine testing simulation. Doing so they can close in on the thousands of parameters for a good etch well before expending in real equipment runs. Both the simulations and the real tests inside varying equipment stages are heavily documented and our development was an important part of that as the work could be queried and re-run.
I was always very proud to deliver design work to help improve their jobs. As I understood it, the Lam process engineers are so valuable and regarded that they aren’t allowed to travel on the same airplane to conferences and meetings.
My job as lead UX designer was to provide the visual prototyping roadmap for multiple applications under the umbrella as it grew and other desktop applications were rolled into it. We had a team of about 5 developer consultants at any one time. Many times we would be adapting to entire changes in direction. So this was very much an agile project. I would work with the product owner, project manager and the developers in order to ensure the work continued to streamline and match the design system and language we evolved over time. In the hundreds of discussions I had with the team, my main value was to capture the requirements, understand and apply via known design patterns, or in some cases inventing new ones and presenting the process in any number of screens and components.
