NASA Conveyance

Project team: Joanna Bresee, Steve Hellenius, Jon Bidwell, M. Azim Ali and Jessa Hafer-Zdral

We created software for NASA to help scientists plan activites in a lunar reconnaissance field test. As the design lead, I led the group through ideation, needs validation and think aloud usability testing.

The following video demonstrates the software we created as it would be used in an simulated NASA field test:

User Research

To study robotic planning we performed eleven interviews and six contextual inquiries both inside and outside of NASA. We learned that Scientists were not able to communicate plans in a language engineers could use. Scientists were hesitant to interact with planning software and were often unaware of engineering constraints. I contributed by making contacts with NASA mission members, running interviews, conducting contexual inquiries and modeling our data.

Design Process

We brainstormed ways to help scientists clearly communicate their planning goals. To validate our concepts, we created storyboards and showed them to the team members of the robotic reconnaissance field tests. I contributed by facilitating brainstorm sessions, sketching storyboards, recruiting participants and presenting our storyboards to mission memebers.

Testing

We tested our designs with ten participants using paper prototypes, and seven participants using digital prototypes. In order to test the success of our final design, we simulated a streamlined version of the lunar reconnaissance rover field test. I contributed by brainstorming interaction techniques, recruiting users, developing a user-study prototcal, running participants and reporting usability problems to the developement team.

Final Design

The final design allows science team members to easily indicate what data they would like to recieve from the rover by allowing them to manipulate camera angle and resolution directly on the map.