Telling Our Story
Finalizing our designs, determining core value, and packaging it up
We did it! After months of ambiguity, going wide and discussing theoretical final solutions, we finally have a product — Iris. Let’s revisit how we got from the trip to Marshall and synthesis of our findings to a holistic design for a software solution.
We Built the Right Thing, But Did we Build it Right?
Coming back from Marshall, we were happy that our concepts were validated by our stakeholders, who confirmed that our suite of features would help them more effectively and confidently complete their work. Our solution was far from perfect, however. After synthesizing our research, there were edits for every single screen. Some edits were small — change this wording here, surface this data there. Some edits were significant — adding functionality to give the user more control, making our tool more adaptable over a project’s evolution.
Our research activities at Marshall were primarily designed to elicit feedback on our concepts and overall structure. To ensure we had also designed things to provide the best possible user experience, we wrote a quick think-aloud protocol and conducted usability testing. There were three main takeaways from this activity:
- Big impact can be achieved with just a few essential features;
- Consistent terminology is essential for cohesiveness; and
- Clear affordance can lead users to high value functionality.
Let’s Make it Look Good
After many, many, many hours digging into the granular details of our design, we finally completed a series of screens that accomplished our goal — centralizing data, connecting engineers, and recording decision points, all in the name of aligning assumptions.
Adding colors (no more grayscale!), we used cool shades of blues and greens as accents against our gray and white backgrounds. This kept the final solution professional and within NASA’s aesthetic, while the pops of color help call attention to action items and guide the eye across the page.
Finally, we turned to the all-important consideration of what to name our product. It didn’t take long before we were all in agreement on Iris. The messenger for the gods would be a good stewardess of our product, with her eye to increasing transparency, creating a path for communication, and helping engineers not only identify and correct misalignments when they happen, but to prevent them in the first place.
The Story of Iris
With the end of the summer nearly upon us, we are faced with the difficult task of condensing eight months of work into a neat, interesting 30 minute package. We understand Iris’s purpose because we understand the NASA SLS context. Conveying Iris as a direct byproduct of our research activities and findings to people who haven’t lived in this intellectual space is going to be a challenge.
Already, we’ve started the hard work of editing our eight month project down to the essentials. We’ve identified the core value of our product, a single flow that demonstrates how users interact with our product and how it will change the way work is done at NASA, and have begun coding this out for a high-fidelity demonstration. Additionally, we’ve created animated gifs to illustrate interaction points and highlighted the functionality that best demonstrates our solution’s usefulness.
In just over a week, this Capstone project with NASA will be over. While the experience has been a rollercoaster of highs and lows, we’ve learned so much about UX research and design, teamwork, and ourselves (as well as space and rocket design!). Check back next week to see our final product and project reflections!
