Geospatial Application

4D Spatial Collaboration tool

My role

I was a UX/UI designer on a team with two other designers, alongside GIS specialists, tech, and business teams. I assisted with user research (interviews, workshops, and prototype testing) and UI design and prototyping on Figma.

Description

This Geospatial Application is a four-dimensional model of rail network that integrates asset data from multiple systems. It also draws in time-enabled data such as historical defects and aerial imagery. This application reduces the time spent on track and maintenance planning.

Benefits of this tool include:

Centralised repository of asset data with offline accessibility through personal device
A 3D environment to facilitate improved contextual understanding of users’ surroundings
Saves time on track maintenance logistics preparation and enhances investigative analytics
Ability to visualise defects predicted and changed, plus analyse defects in regions over time

The process

Discovery

As part of the discovery phase we conducted extensive user interviews with future users of the product. We spoke to people from a variety of different roles across the client, to understand their daily responsibilities, systems and tools, and pain points and opportunities to prioritise key features, create personas and user flows for the different use cases of the program.

workshops

From here we were able to start creating low-fidelity mockups of the program on Figma, which we tested with space-themed workshops as we progressed through to high-fidelity clickable prototypes.

UI design library

Throughout the course of the project we created a comprehensive library of components in Figma to maintain design consistency and interactivity.

We saw the opportunity for an immersive, contextual rail asset visualisation and planning tool, and created a solution that obtains immediate visual access to rail assets and contextual data by digitising the network and providing standardised approaches to capture data rail-wide.

Challenges

Complex subject area
- Geospatial tech design and the specifics of large scale rail maintenance are both very complex subject area to understand. By investing the time in user and product research, we overcame this challenge and were able to create a product that fit the brief
Large amounts of data
- To combine and improve upon the features of all the disparate programs that were being used by the client into one program, the amount of data was immense. The final product has about 50 layers that can be turned on, so to condense this, we split the layers into different teams and use cases so they don't all get used at once
Don't make assumptions
- Managers raised potential issues that we tried to design workarounds for, that ended up not being issues upon talking to users. Lesson: talk to the users, don't only trust those that don't work with the product hands-on, and don't make too many assumptions
Remote area with low or no signal
- The program had to work in areas with low or no signal. There was an IoT device onsite that completed calculations, which meant we did not have to rely on the cloud