Design Lead @ MoonRanger x NASA | Jan - Oct 2022

Misson Control Interface for MoonRanger
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A mission control interface for operators to manage the first micro-rover that will explore for ice on the lunar south pole.

I had a rewarding experience working closely with the Mission Operations Team and NASA Ames Research Center. Our goal was to help operators execute mission tasks by designing an intuitive mission control interface for MoonRanger, an autonomous micro-rover that will search for signs of ice on the moon in December 2023.

Role
Design Lead
Project Manager
UX Researcher

Team
Mission Ops Team Lead
Software Team Lead
4 UX Designers
6 Software Engineers

Key Methods
Design Systems
Rapid Prototyping
Usability Testing
Visual Design

Duration
Jan - Oct 2022,
‍Deployed Dec 2023

MOONRANGER PROJECT SITE ↗CMU HEADS TO THE MOON ↗

DESIGN PROCESS

Design Process

JUMP TO SOLUTION

CONTEXT

Small rover. Big mission.

In collaboration with NASA and a $5.6 million funding, Astrobotics is building a 17kg autonomous lunar rover called MoonRanger that is being sent to the Moon in December 2023 to search for ice. I led the design process from research to prototyping dashboard designs and developed a full-fledged design system for the mission control system used by operators.
👩‍💻 Why is lunar ice important?

Deposits of ice on the Moon would have many practical aspects for future manned lunar exploration. The lunar water could also serve as a source of oxygen, another vital material not readily found on the Moon, and hydrogen, which could be used as rocket fuel.  
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‍NASA Source ↗

MoonRanger passed NASA's key decision point (KDP) review and is in the final stages of preparation.

01 DEFINE

Problem.

The Mission Control Software (MCS) is critical to the mission because it allows operators to connect with the rover throughout different phases. It will be used to navigate the rover, send commands, and collect large amounts of data from the rover's sensors. Operators will only have two hours twice a day during the 14-day mission to connect to the rover and must complete their tasks during this window.
⚡️ How might we enable mission operators to work efficiently and intuitively during their limited 2 hour comm windows? ⚡️
Project Goals:
1. 📄Research, capture, and integrate best usability practices into MoonRanger’s MCS
2. ✍️Design modular views for operator roles across mission operations
3.💎Build a visual language for MoonRanger’s mission control software

Initial Experience.

Incomplete Mission Control Software interfaces that allow manual access to command, navigate, and monitor the Rover.
The current interface is unintuitive and lacks data-driven design

02 RESEARCH

Secondary analysis.

We first had to understand mission requirements, rover functions, and operator roles.
Our initial step was to get a strong grasp on the project as a whole in order to understand user needs and our role. We started with client documents to understand data materials and other context necessary to design our interface. ‍
200+ Project members
1000+ Documents

Scarcely available experts
Loosely defined mission operations processes
Lack of design documentation + UX

🔍 Design Reviews
We held design reviews of mission control external sources, such as OpenMCT, Nasa JPL, and Epsilon-3 to understand how these systems successfully operate.

• How have features been implemented in industry?
• ‍What could be applied to MoonRanger?‍

🔍 Best Practices for Data-Heavy UI
With large amounts of data being uploaded and downloaded from the rover, we needed to solidify our approach to visualizing different aspects of data for operators to analyze.

• Information Architecture
• Visual Hierarchy
• Data Visualizations
• Minimalist interface design

Despite clear mission goals, operator roles remain undefined.

02 RESEARCH

Primary methods.

To further understand and specify each existing role required for the mission, we conducted
‍expert interviews, journey mapping, and scenario generations to learn about required features operators need and what steps occur during each 2 hour communication window with the rover.

🔍 Expert Interviews
We conducted interviews with MoonRanger's experts, including Thermal, Systems, Mechanical, and Software Leads. We also met with the Iris Lunar Rover team to get a sense of what data and features they need to see in the mission control interface.

Key Questions
• What is the end-to-end scope of this research?
• What do people working on tangential products care about?
• What do operators wish they had?
• What is the baseline needed for similar products?

📑 Journey mapping

We conducted a journey mapping activity that shows all steps and visualizes what operators see and do. During this activity, our goal was to ensure that we record critical details of what actions are taken to accomplish mission tasks.

Initial journey mapping with operators

📑 Mission flow

Then we created a mission flow that summarized the stages and steps from our journey mapping. These are the prime actions from comm windows that we will be focusing on for our design.

Consolidated steps and stages

📑 Scenario generations

Generating scenarios helped us recognize and address possible edge cases that are likely to occur during comm windows. Varying scenarios are critical to consider to prepare for multiple errors and situations that operators might face.
Key Questions
1. What is critical information users need to know?
2. What has/will/is happening in the mission from the operator perspective?
3. What types of scenarios matter most?

Multiple edge cases

There was a strong need for effective data visualizations to ease cognitive load on operators and to reduce human errors.

02 RESEARCH

Defining & Interpreting.

Based on what operators need to do during comm windows, we made flow diagrams to map distinct operator roles and a hierarchy of these roles for our own understanding, giving us a clearer idea of what data each individual would need to see.

💬 Role Hierarchy

Mission operations consist of 6 defined roles --> Navigation, Data, Science, and System Health officers, who report to the Command officer, who them communicates with the Flight director.

Operator task flow

💬 Mission Stages

These flow diagrams also helped us map out various command flows displaying what these operators do during the beginning and end stages of comm windows.

Beginning of comm window

End of comm window

02 RESEARCH

Prioritizing Features.

Now that distinct operator roles are defined, we were able to focus on specific features moving into the design phase. Here are the prioritized features that operators need to execute their tasks:

02 RESEARCH

Feature Prioritization.

After finalizing what mission operators need to see and what information they need to access, we listed required features discovered in our research to start understanding how the structure of our interface might work.
This helped us better understand how the main interface should be designed and which features should be put at the forefront to execute tasks quicker.

Features verified by operators

02 RESEARCH

Key Insights.

Our research yielded much information specific to subsystems or operators. We synthesized our findings and discovered three overarching insights:

Features are inherently in groups

Rather than designing features in isolation, we structured them into logically grouped, modular components, for a flexible, plug-and-play interface. This ensures that, despite unclear operator roles, users can seamlessly access and arrange the tools most relevant to their tasks.

Operator roles are guiding, mission requirements are defining

While we had a sense of what operators might need to do, MoonRanger was not yet at that stage. We decided to focus our work around the actions that needed to be completed, rather than the people who may be completing them.

We must accommodate both subject matter experts and novices

We found that the chosen and trained operators will be relatively new to the project, and therefore, we cannot count on them being subject matter experts. It’s imperative that we keep this perspective in mind when designing our interface.

03 DESIGN & ITERATE

Low-fi prototype.

Heading into the first design iteration, we chose to focus on individual widget designs to group into sets of features. This would ensure we understood the operator experience at a micro and macro level before diving deeper into visual details and micro-interactions. Throughout multiple iterations, we also focused on opportunities for modularity.

+ Modularity
+ Early Stage Widgets
+ Side Navigation Bar

03 DESIGN & ITERATE

Mid-fi Prototype.

Based on our feedback from 1:1 interviews, we added new error screens and time scales to relevant pages. We continued expanding on modular screens and aimed for detail and usability using more consistent styles.

+ Error Alerts
‍+ Time Scales
+ Initial Design Style Guide

03 DESIGN & ITERATE

High-fi Prototype.

We discussed with subsystem leads and NASA experts to evaluate our mid-fi designs from an operator perspective. After mid-fi iterations, we discovered changes to consider moving forward.
Modularity is low priority and operators need fully-equipped screens to see all relevant data.
Diving into high-fi iterations, we focused on widgets containing all relevant data desired by individual operators. Our goal was to finalize designs both functionally and visually for handoff to the development team. We also focused on optimized architecture and a design system that refines the visual design of our interface.

+ Comprehensive Design System
+ Optimized Architecture
+ Fully-equipped screens
- Modularity

03 DESIGN & ITERATE

Areas of focus.

Beyond data visualizations, we focused on optimizing panel management and layout refinement.
Taking a closer look at key surfaces / touch-points that our users would interact with. While working on data visualizations, we constantly revisited the visual hierarchy that structures the interface for easier navigation.

04 VALIDATE

Paper Mission Testing.

We conducted a paper mission, essentially, a mock mission that allowed us to see how our designs held up when faced against real mission tasks.

Paper mission testing with mock operators

05 DOCUMENT

Widget Documentation.

To wrap up, we provided a detailed documentation for the development team, and ourselves, to keep track of our work and to ensure no meaning would be lost.

FINAL PRODUCT

MoonRanger MCS for Intuitive Operations

A mission control interface that provides fully-equipped screens using compiled widgets and data visualizations.

01 Navigation
Pose Analysts and Route Planners map paths the rover should explore in the lunar south pole. Post analysts can study map terrains and layouts to determine the best areas to explore and Route Planners create waypoints to plan routes for the rover.

02 Science
Science officers study the Neutron spectrometer system (NSS) visualizations and view the estimated hydrogen count over the rover's path.

03 Errors
Action-specific and global errors make up a large scope of errors that can occur throughout the mission. These are logged for operators to view details and fix.

04 Data Management
Data officers monitor the data rate of materials that are uplinked and downlinked from and to the rover. They keep track of the amount of data that is being downlinked and the amount of storage that is remaining in the system.

05 Commands
Command officers review the ongoing queue of command requests that need to be verified by the flight director. They also need check the data rate and rover status to determine which commands should be sent to the rover.

06 Rover Health
Health officers monitor the health of all systems. They analyze the power status, consumption, and usage of the rover.

07 Software Parameters
Software analysts view and edit the parameters that are hardcoded into the rover. They make necessary changes to some of these values that are eventually sent to the command queue.


VISUAL DESIGN

💎 Design System

A comprehensive design system with components and visualizations for structuring widgets / modals for the mission control system.

Thanks for tuning in!


Ready for blast off! - MoonRanger team 👊👊

@2024 LAUREN PARK

Let's build something together.

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