Mission Log in the Sky with Time Delay
Sprint 6: Future Visioning
Houston, We Are Now in Orbit.
Our team has finally made it to the end of the Spring Semester and is ready to get started on our summer mission. We have been working on synthesizing the little bit of research we have remaining during this semester and thinking about what Summer might look like. To end this portion of our mission, we have been preparing a presentation for the Ames Research team and a visioning session to make sure we are kicking off the summer with a range of blue-sky ideas.
But since our team is not co-located, checkout out the team photo:
Don’t we look like we are ready for any EVA?
But before we get too much into the presentation, let’s go over some of the research we wrapped up this last two weeks.
Competitive Analysis
To wrap up the last part of our spring research and to help us start planning for prototypes this summer, we started our first round of competitive analyses. You might be wondering if we stuck to typical messaging apps as a source for inspiration for ideas on how to improve Playbook. While we did include apps like WhatsApp and GroupMe, we also have plans to dig even further into different variants of communication tools in the coming weeks.
We read somewhere that we spend 80% of our time communicating as humans, and honestly, that sounds about right. Whether it's zoom calls, texting, talking on the phone, or meetings, we do spend a ton of time “passing information” between one another. Communication is not just found in texting applications, phone calls, or speaking in person (what’s that anymore?). It’s everywhere and in everything we do. We also figure out unique ways to do it too. All it takes is for both sides of the conversation to build a shared understanding together.
So yes, we’re looking at so much more than GroupMe or Slack. We’re also looking at communication in email, collaborative team environments (like Google Docs or Miro), transcription services, gaming, project management tools, streaming, and social media.
Here’s what we’ve looked at so far and we’ve found a few interesting features that might be worth looking into this summer — threads, reactions, searchable channels, audio recordings, user-made bots that monitor communication, and the list goes on.
- Slack
- GroupMe
- Facebook Messenger
- Telegram
- Discord
- Clubhouse
- Slowly (a pen-pal like messaging app)
This journey is just beginning, so stay tuned for some more thorough comments in our posts this summer. If you have ideas about what we should look into or unique tools that you use to communicate or collaborate, we’d love to hear them!
Heuristic Evaluation
Along with our competitive analysis, we used Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics to briefly conduct a heuristic evaluation of Mission Log on the crew side. This helped us assess Mission Log based on general best practices for UI design. Here are a few of our preliminary findings:
- Mission Log has a few aspects which don’t follow messaging platform design patterns. If it is more consistent with existing platforms, it could reduce cognitive load since it will be more familiar to users.
- Some words could be transformed into icons to reduce visual clutter (e.g. “high priority,” “acknowledge,” “attach photo,” etc.)
- The ability to cancel or undo sending a message would be a useful feature to have, especially given the time delay.
We plan to continue our evaluation in the summer to propel us into the prototyping stage!
Chronos x MAS Simulated Mission
Next, we conducted our last simulated mission trial of the semester! This one was extra special because we got to run it with some folks from NASA. Not only was it an informative session, but we also discussed how well our protocol simulated time-delayed EVAs, and how it could be improved in the future. As we take our simulated missions with us to the summer, we hope to refine it even further with the help of SMEs to create solid testing grounds for our prototype.
Our experiments helped immerse ourselves in the context and learn more about how AI can be used to support crew during EVAs. Here are a few of our findings:
- Additional assistance could be beneficial for time management (e.g. doing calculations to figure out message timing and tracking mission progress.)
- AI providing recommendations helped maintain crew confidence
Research Report, Presentation, and Project Website
In some projects, the final deliverables are mundane and simply feel “required”. In other projects, the final deliverables feel empowering, inspiring, and bring cohesiveness to drive thoughts forward. In our case, we might say the final deliverables were the latter this semester. Striving to put our thoughts into one, cohesive, and compelling story is no small feat, and it the shortest sense, it pushes us to come to a consensus on all the work that we’ve done so far. Each team member has a part of this project that they have owned and feel that they are an expert in, and combining these many parts, especially when it will determine our next 3 months of work, is awesome to see. The deliberation over how we report, write, or present our work, data, methods, approaches, designs, and decisions is immense. Can’t even begin to tell you how many times we’ve written, re-written, changed, rephrased, and reformed our “insights”.
That said, we are extremely proud of the work we have done so far, and finally sharing it in some cumulative form is so satisfying. We hope you enjoy each part of our deliverables as you see them and will continue to follow us as we work into the summer.
Preparing for Summer
Given our findings, there are a few key concepts we want to keep in mind for the remaining months of this project. Ideally, communication tools should:
- Provide increased context and situational awareness between crew and ground
- Improve feelings of physical and psychological isolation when the crew is far from Earth
- Support rather than overwhelm the crew’s decision-making ability
- Lower the crew’s cognitive load
Moving forward, we plan to iteratively design and prototype improvements to Playbook in a way that positions it to be the central hub for communication. We want to continue to think about how our design decisions will impact the relationship and role shift between crew and ground. Additionally, we also need to consider how we might bridge the gap between near and far-term solutions as well. Future testing with these prototypes will help us understand the level of customization and automation that users are comfortable with. Along these lines, preemptively reaching out to true users — astronauts and members of Mission Control — for testing will be one of our objectives early in the summer.
To assist in our usability testing process, we have decided to modify our simulated mission protocol to ensure it is more generalizable to the analogous missions that NASA has run and the future state of space missions to the moon and Mars. This means we must reevaluate the tasks and conditions of our test to match our context-of-use which is time-delayed EVAs. This ensures that the results and findings of our simulated mission can be used to validate the usability of our prototype. Lastly, we also plan to use the standard set of NASA AMES procedures for usability evaluation to test the prototype.
However, our summer won’t be all procedures and protocols! There is, of course, a fun side to prototyping and building.
Here’s a little taste of what it might look like, both for our summer, as well as NASA in the future.
Chronos Communication
We’ve recently been exploring the use of AI Assistants to reduce cognitive load and provide morale support for astronauts. Luckily, we don’t have to travel into deep-space to find one! Meet Vector, he’s a robot assistant developed by Anki. Who knew AI could be so adorable?
For our upcoming Spring Presentation to NASA, we created a Spotify Playlist with some out-of-this-world space jams to set the atmosphere. Check it out here!
Signing off for now,
Chronos
Chronos Acronym Dictionary
AI: Artificial Intelligence
ARC: Ames Research Center
BASALT: One of NASA’s analog mission project to design and develop elements of future missions that could send humans to conduct science and exploration on Mars
CAPCOM: Capsule Communicator
CCTV: Closed Circuit Television
CDMS: Command & Data Management Systems Officer
CDR: Commander
CDS: Central Data System
DCS: Display & Control Monitor
ESA: European Space Agency
EVA: Extra-Vehicular Activity
F/C: Flight Controller
FD: Flight Director
HERA: Human Exploration Research Analog
IMF: In Flight Maintenance
INCO: Instrumentation & Communications Officer
IVA: Intra-Vehicular Activity
JSC: Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
KSC: John F. Kennedy Space Center
MCC: Mission Control Center
MD: Mission Director
MS: Mission Specialist
MSCI: Mission Scientist
NEEMO: NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation
SA: Situational Awareness
SME: Subject Matter Experts
Opinions expressed are solely our own and do not represent the views or opinions of The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
