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 analysts specific challenges with our platform.
Key problems
1. Analyst were struggling to trust our data, they wanted to verify and view our data in different formats.
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. Analyst weren’t able to benefit from our data, we lacked capabilities and features they needed to do their job.
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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Provide analyst with metadata, confidence scores and the tools/features they require to properly filter and understand our data. This plan is meant to provide analyst with better capabilities and more refined visualization of our data so they can feel confident about what they’re doing within MS.
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Redesign and reorganize the layout (UI) of Mission Space so that content and features are easier to navigate and find. This allows users to save time and gather the insights they need when they need them.
05
Redesigned & Reorganized
Ultimately we designed a new layout for the map view, introduced new features and redesigned some of the visual components of the platform. 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 a search engine, which allows users to search beyond just vessels. On the visual design end we created new icons.
06
User Feedback & Callenges
This platform went through the end to end process and was released to customers. We saw an overall improvedment of when conducting usability testing. Addiotnally we also noticed a decrease in customer solutions involvement, less support focused on capabilities and trust issues.