Redesigning Transocean’s deep sea control system for safety and efficiency

A mile below the ocean's surface. 300 tons. 5 stories tall. Big, heavy, slow, expensive.

We worked with Transocean to redesign their subsea control HMI while they re-engineered the blowout preventer in light of past tragedies. The challenge was to make a powerful but novel system familiar to veteran drillers while also helping them understand the nuanced mechanical differences that would help them operate from a mile above the hardware.

Approach & Principles

Our team spent time on the rig to understand their operations and culture. We co-designed with SMEs and tested repeated with a wide range of experienced drillers and roughnecks.

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Familiarity: I leaned on familiar-to-drillers mental models and physical representations of the subsea system to avoid adoption resistance.

HMI best practices: The loud, dirty drill shack presents challenges—touch targets, data visualizations, readability—and being able to see status from across the room. Applying HMI best practices instead of more standard web or app design

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• Iterative testing took the HMI's usability score from below average to the 97th percentile on the System Usability Scale.
• At launch, user consensus was that the new HMI provided:
  • Clarity at a glance from across the drill shack.
  • Confidence to avoid costly mistakes.
  • Understanding of how a new system actually worked.