Kicking Off Summer Semester @ NASA Ames
Relocating from Pittsburgh, PA to NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.
The past weeks have been busy for Team Far Out! We moved to Mountain View, California to be closer to our clients at the NASA Ames Research Center. After settling into our new office space and receiving our official NASA intern badges, we went straight to work.
Finding our Point of View
In case you forgot, by the end of Spring Semester we had refined our problem statement to focus on creating a collaborative tool for engineers to share and align their rocket design assumptions. This would help to ensure the pieces of the SLS puzzle would fit together correctly, minimizing milestone review delays.
Once we had this direction, we began working on defining Team Far Out’s point of view — that is, our team’s unique approach to tackling the problem of misaligned design assumptions. This would serve as a guiding force in our prototyping and create a shared vision amongst the team. Our initial POV was as follows:
Initial POV: structured collaboration for efficient design making.
In order to understand other products’ POVs and glean inspiration for our own, we conducted a competitive analysis.
Competitive Analysis
Our competitive analysis analyzed software tools that had different approaches to “structured collaboration”. We analyzed 15 tools in total across a wide range of industries, including design, mechanical engineering, and software engineering. Among these tools were Figma, Google Docs, and GitHub.
We categorized tools into several general buckets, including Enterprise Social Networks and Decision Making Tools. This helped us understand each product’s different approach to collaboration. It also highlighted key features that we could repurpose for our solution.
Fortified with and inspired by the knowledge from our competitive analysis, we refined the feature prototypes we made during Spring Semester.
Speed Dating with Engineers at Marshall
With our prototypes updated, it was time to begin user testing to validate the usefulness of design concepts. We “speed-dated” a variety of lo-fi feature prototypes remotely with two rocket design engineers at Marshall Space Center. The results gave us a direction moving forward and corrected some of our assumptions.
Client Presentation
Another major piece of work we did during this design sprint was to re-present our Spring Presentation to our clients and co-workers at Ames. We updated our presentation slightly to be more accommodating to our new audience.
After the presentation, we conducted a Visioning Activity, during which we received feedback on our different feature prototypes from Ames UX designers.
Getting Serious About Prototyping
Taking feedback into account from the Visioning Activity at Ames as well as user testing with rocket engineers at Marshall, we narrowed our project scope once more. We decided to pursue two major design directions as we created more holistic, realistic prototypes:
- Standards Sharing: Enabling engineers to view each other’s design approaches on a collaborative specification sheet, highlighting discrepancies between specs, as well as relevant updates.
- Decision Making: Creating a platform where engineers can engage in cross-team decision-making about design changes in a structured and low-effort way.
Splitting into Sub-Teams
From there, we decided to split into sub-teams and create mid-fi prototypes for each of the two design directions. This enabled us to more rapidly create flows.
Internal Testing
Because we had limited access to Marshall rocket engineers for user testing (and because user fatigue was setting in), we decided to test these prototypes internally with each other. We will continue to refine our designs based on feedback from these tests.
What’s Next?
Recently, our clients and faculty advisors approved another research trip to Marshall Space Center in Huntsville Alabama to test prototypes in-person with rocket engineers. Moving forward, we plan to combine our design ideas into one prototype and refine, refine, refine to get ready for this trip!
We are 5 MHCI students at Carnegie Mellon University, currently working on our capstone project, where we work with NASA to help engineers understand being “done” in building the Space Launch System (SLS). We will be taking turns to write about our research activities and insights, design decisions and how we navigate through ambiguity in general.
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