Digital Air Strike Mission Control was built to be the main web portal/dashboard of the client of Digital Air Strike. It was meant to serve as a hub for the customer, so that they see all their information about their online reputation in one place. It was meant to be an aggregate for them, pulling in all the data sources we had. We wanted them to be able to not just get a quick view, but be able to dig in as needed.
We launched the portal in Q2 of 2016, and then began work on version 2.0 of Mission Control. Throughout the entire process I was an advocate for the end user. It was an interesting project because throughout the whole thing I had to balance the needs of the client, and the end user, these roles are usually not the same person with our business. I worked to make it was attractive enough to sell, but also user friendly so that whatever data the end user needed it was right at their finger tips. Along side Mission Control there was a side project of making sure the mobile app had parity in terms of both functionality and design with Mission Control.
Mission Control was born out of the needs of the client base. They wanted an easy way to view information about their online reputation. It was decided that we should build an online Dashboard to serve this need of the clients. The difficulties was that we had a limited development team to be able to handle all the data that the tool was meant to be pulling into one central dashboard. All of the wireframes I designed were meant to be able to be built by the development team that I was working with.
I was the UX lead on the Mission Control product. I worked closely with the product manager and the rest of the team from the beginning of the project. As UX lead for the Mission Control project I shaped what functionality it would have and how the user would interact with it. I aided in the initial brainstorm of ideas, developing site-maps, gathering the user requirements, creating personas and designing the wireframes. After Mission Control launched I began working on the next iteration and thinking of new functionality that could added and how we could better refine the user experience.
I was there from the beginning, asking all of these people their ideas, and condensing them down into visualizations and ideas for Mission Control. I worked with the product manager to refine these ideas until we had a list of components that should be included in Mission Control. I then took these components and designed a navigation framework with another ux designer that would fit the user needs. Together we took all of these elements and combined them into wireframes of the portal. Throughout the whole thing we made sure that it would also make sense on a mobile display. Once wireframes were completed, and the portal was being constructed I aided the programmers in understanding the designs, and answering any questions they had about the user experience.
The initial design of Mission Control had a lot of data and gave a large overview for the user. As I moved forward with user testing it became clear that the home screen was a little overwhelming for the user. We we displaying the information that they wanted to see but there was just too much of it. As we iterated on the design the key thing that I was cognizant of was how much information was being displayed on each page.
As the design progressed forward less information was displayed and the layout changed. We wanted all the data to be displayed where the user expected to see it. At each step of the way the wireframes were either tested in person with some of our customers, or over a video session. We wanted to make sure that our clients were guiding the design of Mission Control at every step of the way.
One of the key parts of Mission Control was that it had to be viewable on a Mobile Phone. The mobile design was just as important as the desktop. We wanted our customers to quickly check their phone to see if there were any reputation issues that needed to be addressed. We made sure to always keep that in mind while designing the mobile view.
In the end Mission Control displayed far less data on the home screen than initially designed. This was mostly due to constant testing with our customers. Another reason was just the development limitations of aggregating so much data on one page. In the end a balance was struck to trim down the home page some, so that the other data would be displayed in different section of the app. All the changes were verified with the user group. In the end our users were very happy with this new tool they had to monitor their online reputation.
