Mission Space
Improving the User Experience
Overview
Mission Space is a DaaP product with unique RF geolocation capabilities that enhances the visualization, interpretation, and usability of Radio Frequency data by unifying automated workflows, behavior recognition, and intuitive mission management functionality.
Goal
The overall goal of this project was to enhance usability of Mission Space for it's end users (Intel. Analyst), to increase profitability and customer retention.
Role
UX Designer (Research, Information Architecture and Interaction Design)
01
About Mission Space
The Mission Space platform provides our military defense customers with the information they need to strategize and take action. We make it easy for Geospatial Intelligence Analyst to discover our Radio Frequency data so they may gather insights from all over the world easily. They are able to filter through signals, follow areas of interests or geolocations and get alerts on emitter movement. Additionally analyst are able to create snapshots for presentations and export data for further inspection.
02
The End User
Our customers vary from foreign to domestic military defense and civil law enforcement. Our end user is the geospatial intelligence analyst. These analyst user our data and MS to provide their managers with the knowledge they require for strategic and tactical missions.
03
The Problem
Based on user & customer feedback we learned that Mission Space was missing key features that was making it difficult for analyst to navigate and use our RF Data. We did additional user testing, user interviews and heuristic evaluations to validate feedback and gain further insight on the analyst's specific challenges with our platform.
Key problems we discovered
1. Some users weren't able to use our features easily or as quickly as they would have liked.
2. We discovered that users were struggling to find our more advanced features, this was causing cognitive overload and forcing users to abandon their workflow.
3. We had performance issues which led to trust issues with our data-- customers were exporting our data and uploading it to ArcGIS.
04
The Solution
I workshopped with designers, product managers, front end and back end developers to ensure we were all aligned and understood the problems as we set out to create solutions. This collaborative approach allows us to coordinate and plan solutions that are user centric and capable of being created.
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Goals for this project
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Organize the layout (IA) of the content/components to reduce cognitive overload.
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Redesign the interaction of "complex" features so users may easily complete associated tasks.
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Introduce a new visual design solution that will account for accessibility and contrast issues.
05
Redesigned & Reorganized
Ultimately we designed a new layout for the map view, redesigned some of the visual components of the platform. We did this as we created new features that were incorporated into the platform as well. The new layout includes a repurpose of the data panel where you can now only view data, we moved components like Filters and Configurations to the left to increase visibility of data information in the bottom panel, and allow users to edit map properties simultaneously. Some new features and capabilities include Vessel.AI tracking and the H3 coverage map, which enhances performance of the map and signals, and we added a search engine, which allows users to search beyond just vessels. On the visual design end we created new icons.
06
User Feedback & Callenges
Challenges include balancing between the product team's roadmap and Engineer's time. I handled this by presenting the redesign/reorganization project to stakeholders who agreed in its value. Another challenge included little to no access to external Analyst, luckily we have internal analyst who we worked with, but because each customer is different we account for each analyst's experience.
We saw improvement in customer trust due to confidence scores. There was a decrease in customer solutions tickets related to map configurations. Overall usability testing findings showed a decrease in time spent searching for features(quicker completion of related tasks).
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