Hey Commander, There’s An Endless Path to Reexamine
Sprint 7: Low-Fidelity Prototypes and Initial Usability Testing
A vision must be much more than a project, even a big project.
— Robert S. Walker, FINAL FRONTIER, April 1989.
With endless possibilities of what space travel to Mars may look like, our team is prepared to make deep-space-mission communication one that can take on any of those possibilities.
After a short break after presenting our research to the NASA Ames Research team, we have been full speed ahead (and it doesn’t look like we are slowing down any time soon)!
Preparing for the Mission
Heuristic Evaluation
To better understand Playbook, we used Neilson’s 10 Heuristics to evaluate the current Playbook as a whole, and Mission Log specifically. Our team had learned about Heuristic Evaluation in our Programming Usable Interfaces class in the Fall, but little did we know that we would be applying what we learned so quickly … or how long it takes to conduct a Heuristic Evaluation.
By evaluating Playbook as a whole and specifically Mission Log, we were able to understand the areas of improvement on a small and large scale and note all the features that would be needed from a heuristic lens.
Our big takeaways:
- By increasing the consistency and standards within Mission Log, there is potential to decrease cognitive load
- Redundancy of information is important to ensure accuracy, but the interface presents limitations on ways to fix errors that may occur
- Information is presented in different separate pages which may increase the need to recall information
Ideation
From our foundational research and establishing our four main insights from the spring semester, our team began ideating. We approached ideation generation in two phases:
- Idea generation with the NASA Team
- Idea generation within Chronos
We had the opportunity to play Round Robin with the NASA team to generate ideas around our four insights. We turned our insights into “How Might We” statements as the starting point for iterative collaborative ideation.
- How might we improve situational awareness between crew and ground with communication tools?
- How might we support crew well-being with communication tools?
- How might we support the crew’s decision-making with communication tools?
- How might we lower cognitive load with communication tools?
From there, our team decided to keep going! We wrote down anything and everything that came to mind, because we all know the best ideas from the craziest ones, right?!
So when 4 starting sticky notes suddenly became 228, we knew we had to do some sorting. We sorted all the ideas from both sessions into
- Near-term ideas (Ideas that could be implemented within 12–18 months)
- Midterm ideas (Ideas that could be done within the next 2–5 years)
- Far-terms ideas (Ideas that would require emerging technology and at least 5 years)
From our ideas, we found communication goes beyond just the chat, and there is a need to connect conversation to crew tasks as a way to keep Mission Control aware of the situation.
Mission Focus
Our ideation scope was wide and definitely too large to tackle in just two and a half months! After evaluating our research, heuristic evaluation, and ideas, we narrowed our focus down to answering one question:
How can a communication tool increase situational awareness (SA) to assist decision-making in deep-space missions?
We researched existing methodologies and UI standards that have been used to support SA and found situational awareness can be broken down into three parts:
- Level 1 SA — perception of elements in the environment, refers to the ability of the operator(s) to perceive the values, functioning, and status of the system. The kinds of information that needs to be mediated vary between fields, and the means of delivering this information may use different modalities.
- Level 2 SA — comprehension of the current situation, addresses the understanding and interpreting of the data that the system mediates with the operator. Level 2 SA is determined by the union of level 1 SA and the user’s goals and mental model. Providing good level 2 SA means allowing the user to understand the importance of the pieces of data, and consequently to map the information with the current goals the operator is pursuing.
- Level 3 SA — projection of future status, refers to the operator being able to predict how the elements of the system will vary in the near future.
With these three levels, we started to define what made up Situational Awareness during space missions, which led to establishing situational awareness as:
- (MCC) Knowing if the crew needs assistance
- (Crew) Time Math
- (Crew) Topic Clustering/Data Triangulation
- (Crew + MCC) Knowing what the crew is doing
- (Crew + MCC) Context of Conversation
- (Crew) Understanding changes affecting current status
- (Crew) Knowing if there is an action/task crew needs to take immediately
- (Crew) Knowing the progress of a request being executed by MCC
- (Crew + MCC) Knowing if the crew/MCC has received and understood the message in time
With all these different pieces that make up situational awareness, wrapping our minds around creating a solution that would address all of this …
means narrowing once more! (Did you really think we were gonna tackle all of those criteria?)
With this new breakdown, we looked back at our past interviews, heuristic evaluation, and potential ideas to assist in focusing our scope on a smaller area of situational awareness.
When reviewing our past work and notes, we knew we wanted a communication system that would help the crew on an EVA to make decisions within a time-delayed environment. When assessing this situation we found Time Math, Topic Clustering, and Conversation Context are three main pieces in assisting in decision making and correlate tightly when the crew wants to determine situational awareness.
Time Math — The ability for a crew member to estimate how long something will take (e.g. when they will finish a task, when they will receive a response to a message, etc.).
Topic Clustering — The ability to identify chunks of related information that altogether help people understand the situation
Conversation Context — The ability to identify the context of a message that is received.
Our North Star 💫
To make sure our iterative design process guides us to our final goal, we established Design Principles to act as our “North Star.” These principles will help make sure we are staying on track and alert us if we are deviating from our intended goal!
Taking the Mission on In Sprints
Ready to take on the Summer Mission, we decided to adopt the GV design sprint methodology as a base for our testing throughout the summer to help with fast and dirty iterations and let us test more ideas faster!
Sprint 1.1
For Sprint 1.1, we wanted to first tackle the idea of Topic Clustering.
Goal: Assess how we might increase situational awareness in communication through topic clustering using high breadth or high depth prototypes.
Hypothesis: Situational awareness in communication can be improved by designing for topic clustering which improves message comprehension, improves task success (decreases task error), time to complete the task, depth of task completion, etc.
Each of us sketched different interface ideas which led us to determine which features we wanted to test.
We decided to test two different ideas: Modular Playbook and EVA Mode
Modular Playbook Features
- Modular Layout
- Task creation from a Conversation
- Status of Crew Members
- Chat Threading
EVA Mode Features
- Retroactive Clipping
- Media Annotation
Due to the scope of our goal, we may have taken more than we could chew, so we decided that we only test the Modular Playbook.
From our usability testing, we found
- Coupling tasks and conversation is helpful in understanding the context, but creating a task from a chat may not have enough information to warrant the creation of a new task. This suggests that creating a chat thread from a task is good for context, but creating a task from the chat may lack sufficient context.
- The mental model of a calendar for general users is a vertical orientation
- While crew may look for specific information, information needs to be coupled with additional context information for future prediction as well
- There are expectations to have certain information in certain areas of the screen.
As our team moved into our next week, we made adjustments to help decrease our sprint scope. We focused more on a scenario to hopefully assist in finding more concrete ways to track metrics and creating tasks that can assist in answering the questions we are testing and fulfilling our goal more closely.
Sprint 1.2
In hopes of narrowing our sprint scope, we identified a more narrow goal and hypothesis.
Goal: Test multiple designs for representing time in Playbook and Mission Log and assess how effective they are in helping crew and MCC make informed decisions about whether to send a message or not in the context of an EVA and its constraints.
Hypothesis: An increase in effective, timely, and usable “time” features in Playbook and Mission Log will increase the crew’s confidence that they have enough information to move forward with a decision about a task. If they cannot make a decision now, these features will help in their decision to send (or not send) messages to MCC. These features will also help determine whether or not MCC feedback can support mission tasks on schedule or if alternative plans need to be made.
In reflecting on Sprint 1.1, we wanted to take on EVA (Extravehicular Activity) mode as a way to understand the coupling of information and how different visualizations of time would assist in the decision-making process.
For an EVA, the intravehicular astronaut (IV) will have access to a minimum of 1 computer and up to 7 monitors when monitoring and assisting an EVA from the vehicle. Because of the increased number of screens available to them, we found that we had more space to test and understand the coupling of information and how redundant information has to be. We decided to porotype two different layouts for EVA Mode:
- Task Communication and Task Execution
- EV Communication and Mission Control Communication
Each prototype featured a combination of features:
- Time Visualization on the Timeline
- Chat Status Visualization
- Predicted Time of Arrival
- Current Time and MCC time
- Reminder setting
- Chat Time Details
- The Ability to Sort a Chat — an “as sent” or “as received” format
During our usability tests, we were able to see how each layout compared and understand the confidence of how a crew member may be in making a decision with the information provided.
We have just finished up our usability testing for EVA mode, so we will get back to you in the next post with our findings!
Chronos Communication!
Even with a break, it’s almost like the universe knows we are working on a project about Mars. Nandhini happened upon this joke during her trip to the National Aviary here in Pittsburgh!
To commemorate the start of Summer, we watched WALL-E, and we highly recommend this movie! WALL-E, short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class, is the last robot left on Earth. He spends his days tidying up the planet, one piece of garbage at a time. After 700 years, WALL-E has developed a personality, and he’s more than a little lonely. One day, he spots EVE, a sleek and shapely probe sent back to Earth on a scanning mission. WALL-E embarks on his greatest adventure yet when he follows EVE across the ~ galaxy ~. Check it out on Disney+.
Signing off for now,
Chronos
Opinions expressed are solely our own and do not represent the views or opinions of The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
