SATELLITE AR

An AR mobile app for visualizing overhead satellites using the device's camera

An employee's exploratory project had been released many years earlier at the dawn of AR experiences, but the UI was poor and didn't scale properly. With the company newly rebranded, this small app needed a makeover.

GALLERY

Sat AR Screens
Sat AR Screens
Sat AR Screens
Sat AR Specifications
Sat AR Specifications

DETAILS

Requirements

  • Retain all existing functionality from the old app
  • Update all styles and interactions to better suit a mobile device
  • Rebrand the experience and encourage users to visit the company's site

My Involvement

  • Role : Lead designer
  • Timespan : 9 months

  • Scale : Full mobile aerospace application, with layouts, visual styles, written content, image assets, and iconography

Story

This was my first opportunity to design a mobile app that would be developed. I started by interviewing the employee who had originally created the app to get his input on what had and hadn't worked well. There was neither time nor budget for external user testing or interviews, so I downloaded the app myself and talked with several coworkers who had used it in the past.

After becoming familiar with the limited existing functionality, I set to utilizing the company styles to reskin the experience, while also making minor quality-of-life improvements that would fit within the tight development budget. In addition to styles, the app needed a new set of icons and image assets, on-screen copy editing, and a new logotype. With no bandwidth from the internal Marketing department, I was tasked with providing the full experience.

The developer implemented the UX specifications with good visual fidelity, but the underlying framework, meant to serve both Android and IOS devices with a single codebase, presented many challenges. The design had to be renegotiated and altered repeatedly due to limitations and bugs found during testing that my UX teammate and I performed.