ABB - Wizard Composer
Automating the creation of commissioning software for electric drives.
Role
Service Designer
Mapped the commissioning flow and stakeholders, then created mockups.
Results
Streamlined creation flow
We streamlined the wizard creation flow and added much-needed quality-of-life features.
Client
ABB Drives
ABB's motor-drives division, serving industry and infrastructure worldwide.
01. Commissioning's Current Bottleneck
Creating commissioning software today depends on highly skilled personnel—typically the Product Manager—who must combine specialized knowledge of the drive model, its firmware, the industry, and the application. This concentration of expertise creates a bottleneck, raises the barrier to entry, and makes the process hard to scale.
It ultimately serves commissioning technicians, who would otherwise rely on outdated software or clunky HMIs to set everything up. The wizard removes that friction, giving them a guided path to commission drives correctly the first time.
02. A peculiar stakeholder map
We mapped how a client request travels from first contact to a logged, assigned wizard development task.
It's not a time-sensitive process, but it's labor-heavy—each wizard is hand-coded—and it's essential, since proper drive setup is critical, especially in infrastructure where failures carry real consequences.
03. Future-proofing the process
The stakeholders' competing needs set the objectives—make wizards easy to create, store, and recall, and cut the technical skill needed to commission a drive.
After satisfying the base needs we looked towards future-proofing the process by adding multi-language support for a global install base, code reuse and a shared database to build, save, search, and recall wizards without duplicates. These features allow for company-wide collaboration and sharing of institutional knowledge between product managers.
04. Pathing the choices
On the user side, the automated drive-firmware selector validates compatible combinations at input, so a non-expert can't build an invalid setup, while internal and external comments carry the PM's knowledge forward instead of leaving it locked in one person.
On the infrastructure side, that same validation protects critical deployments where a wrong parameter has real consequences, and the shared database with edit history keeps every published wizard traceable, versioned, and reusable across teams.
05. Building a Mockup
The final mockup gives some visual continuity to the previous product to ease adoption; most of the wizard-creating features have been left untouched, as that's a domain too technical to crack in a day.
The bulk of the work consists in the addition of many quality of life changes that simplify the creation process, prevent errors and allow for institutional knowledge transfer.
Conclusions & Lessons
The biggest lesson was about dealing with legacy systems: even what might seem a minor feature could imply a full overhaul of both process and software. Balancing every addition on that edge is easier said than done.
The ABB Project Manager present on site praised the work as something that could be implemented immediately. In his view, it would address many of the wizard-creation issues the team faces today.