Main Roads Western Australia

Main Roads WA faced this problem in 2019, as their response team were operating a live, deeply complex system of traffic management and response, while routinely working across more than 30 separate tools, systems and interfaces. With Perth growing fast, the need for consistent, timely response to road events and incidents was becoming a harder proposition to meet.

Their team called in Anthologie to explore ways to streamline this problem and develop a working prototype of how things could improve for their operating team.

Main Roads were keen to put the needs of the organisation front and centre, preferring not to look for an off-the-shelf SaaS product as a magic bullet. Further, any proposed solution should lean more into consolidating the existing suite of tools, than favouring a ground-up rebuild.

Our first step in approaching this sort of task is to treat it as an appropriately human issue. Who is most affected by the way things are, and how they might change? The Main Roads Network Operators perform a data-heavy job, requiring them to process and respond to a wide range of data points across the day.

Taking a step back, we spent considerable time with the on-tools team in their real time operations centre, living the day-to-day obstructions, frustrations and bottlenecks alongside them. They routinely worked between a collection of detached screens and systems, losing time and productivity to constant authentication and context switching. Staff used different sets of tools for different purposes, and found their own shortcuts and best practices to perform their role.

Given all of this, our proposal was straightforward: if we could bring those systems into a consolidated, customisable user interface, we could remove the friction of operating multiple systems, reduce time spent cross-navigating, and allow staff to tailor the tools to best fit their personal approach.

We worked quickly to plan, design and build a functional prototype, a React-based platform that offered a working integration with a number of high-use tools, captured within a single user interface.

Core to the offering were real time visualisations bringing in multiple data-sources into a 3D map, allowing the operator to enable a range of diagnostic overlays such as weather, traffic congestion and road monitoring devices. Alongside this, individual tools could be summoned and positioned around the map to build a personal interface appropriate to the user’s needs in the moment.

The prototype demonstrated a clear path forward, a blueprint for improving overall performance that would benefit both the organisation and the individual members of the team.