The Problem

This major telecommunications hardware manufacturer supplies products to all of the major telecommunications providers maintaining our cell towers such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and more. Many of the technicians are contractors with little experience and/or little training on the maintenance and installation of existing and new hardware. The company provides e-learning programs, training, and manuals for all of its hardware, but it requires the user to be seated at a computer. This isn’t very helpful when a technician is given a new piece of hardware and needs to have it installed in a few hours.

The Research

We met with a number of subject matter experts, those writing the training, those maintaining the manuals, as well as the technicians and their managers to better understand what’s working about their online training, and where it fails to meet the needs of the techs in the field. We reviewed their training materials and the processes of replacing old tower hardware with new.

The Solutions

Based on suggestions of the company’s innovation team, along with confirmations from their field techs, we designed and developed a mobile augmented reality solution to provide remote, and just-in-time learning. These new courses leveraged existing training material when a tech had the time to review or learn about something coming soon. But the real solution was the AR, 3D interactive tutorials that could help a tech perform maintenance and installation step-by-step with no prior knowledge of the hardware or setup. The AR option allowed the tech to overlay virtual hardware in their actual space to compare wiring and setup.