Falcon
Overview
Falcon is an application used to view drone analytics in a digestible way. The executive dashboard is used to capture the picture of “how are we doing” through the lense of important and defined drone metrics.
The Client
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the largest national laboratory of its kind under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy. They specialize in advanced materials, supercomputing, neutrons, nuclear science, energy, security, and scientific discovery. For this project, I worked specifically with the Geographic Data Science group.
Problem Statement
The Geographic Data Science Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory wished to have a drone analytics application that could display many different metrics that sensors reported on in a digestible way. The client desired an esthetically pleasing UI with rich data visualizations and intuitive functionality.
The Process
Research was key in designing this application. I spent a considerable amount of time studying data visualization tools and techniques. I also benchmarked other enterprise data visualization software.
One of the primary challenges was how to display the density of data in a digestible way. To accomplish this, I used the user experience principle of progressive disclosure to hone in the user’s focus on only the metrics that they care about. These metrics help the user to gain a picture of the performance of the drone and why the drone might be experiencing success or failure.
With hundreds of data metrics being reported, the executive dashboard allows for a focused and condensed view for the user. The challenge of displaying immense data was overcome by always giving the user context into the analytics they are viewing. To accomplish this, I created a clear information architecture. The hierarchy that was established includes Region of Flight, Drone Path, Flight Number, and Scene within Flight.
I designed a custom icon set to give Falcon a unique feel and consistent feel throughout the application.
Terminology
Region: area or zone in which a drone flies
Drone Path: the flight path of the drone.
Flight Number: designation code for a specific drone flight
Scene within Flight: a snapshot of the coordinates of a drone within a specific flight.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
After conducting research, benchmarking other enterprise applications, creating a clear information architecture, and wireframing, I designed Falcon in Sketch.
Using Invision, I created a high-fidelity prototype that ensured a smooth transition from design to development. In addition, I designed a design system for Falcon in order to maintain consistent styling and take advantage of componentizing assets. This allowed for the ability to iterate quickly not only for design, but also for the development team by utilizing reusable components.
Involving the development team in the design process early on is of the utmost importance in order to maintain scope, clearly communicate throughout the process, understand limitations, and ensure implementation is correct. It allowed for expectations to be managed with the shifting demands and requirements of the project.
This page shows an in depth view of the positional shift metric. This page is an example of how progressive disclosure is used throughout the application. The page shows the user more information about positional shift without overwhelming them with too much data at one time. The user came from the context of the executive dashboard and this page acts as a detail page for the positional shift metric.
The top graph shows positional shift over a 30 day period. The bottom table shows the average positional shift by sensor, and highlights particularly high positional shifts in red and low positional shifts in green. The table also shows how a sensor is trending overtime with the small graph associated with the sensor’s row.
The Sensor Overview page is much like the executive dashboard, but contrastingly the information is broken down further to report on the metrics in the context of each sensor.
Results
The design of Falcon allowed the users to collect a quick pulse of the drone system and easily gather key information. The left side menu allowed the user to quickly navigate between pages to absorb crucial metrics. The client was pleased to have a very aesthetically pleasing design without sacrificing the extensiveness of the data.