Halliburton — Tetiana K.

The Problem

Decision Space Geosciences is a complex desktop application used by engineers across 7 different teams for geo-seismic data analysis. Despite being a critical tool in daily workflows, the software was consistently reported as unintuitive and difficult to use.

No systematic user research had ever been done on the product. Teams were building features based on assumptions, technical requirements, and individual stakeholder requests — but no one had a clear, evidence-based picture of how users actually experienced the software.

My Approach

I designed and led the first structured UX research initiative for Decision Space Geosciences. This was a cross-team effort that required both depth and breadth:

Conducted 40+ user interviews with engineers, geoscientists, and domain specialists
Ran workshops with all 7 development teams to understand their perspectives, constraints, and priorities
Mapped end-to-end workflows to identify pain points, redundancies, and gaps
Performed a gap analysis between current capabilities and user needs
Created comprehensive deliverables: sitemaps, user stories, user journeys, and a detailed research report

Team & Process

I led a team of designers and collaborated closely with product managers, business analysts, and domain experts across all 7 development teams. This was the first time a structured UX research effort had been undertaken for this product.

The process required navigating a complex organizational structure — each team operated semi-independently with their own backlogs, priorities, and stakeholders. Building alignment across these teams was as much a communication challenge as a research one.

Outcome

The UX improvements we identified and proposed were ultimately blocked — not by design quality, but by organizational and budgetary constraints. Each of the 7 teams had independent 3-year roadmaps with no cross-team alignment mechanism. There was no shared prioritization framework and no budget allocated for cross-cutting UX improvements.

However, the research gave leadership an evidence-based picture of the real barriers to product improvement. For the first time, there was documented, structured evidence showing that the usability problems were systemic — rooted in how the organization was structured, not in any individual team's execution.

“This is what research is for: not always to validate a solution, but sometimes to show that the problem is elsewhere.”

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