My Experience Designing Nova

OVERVIEW

Nova (formerly Fire AI) began as an AI hotspot detection software with the vision of providing first responders the tools to new wildfires before they grow uncontrollable with the use of drones.

My time working on Nova involved creating an MVP, transitioning it into an open beta, facilitating a rebrand and expanding features to fit different markets.

ROLE

Designer

UX, UI, Scrum master

2022 - Present

PROBLEM

Traditional wildfire suppression for first responders involved a large team who would form a line and scan within the fire perimeter- costing a lot of resources and time. Soon after, helicopters would be flown overtop to scan the areas. While this was safer, it did not reduce the high costs to organize a helicopter operation with a pilot and crew, sometimes requiring helidrops into inaccessible areas by vehicles.

GOAL

Utilize the growing adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) as the aircraft that scans and captures infrared data to upload into an artificial intelligence model. This model would automatically detect hotspots and plot it onto a map to reduce costs, save time and ensure greater safety for first responders.

Background

I joined the team as the lead designer with the responsibility to design and develop the Fire AI website as well as guide the developer team by providing UX and UI prototypes of the software. The product began as an MVP to show the viability and would get alpha tested to a handful of drone crews on real wildfires during the busy fire season. Additionally, I would create print and digital advertisements for the marketing team for trade shows to grow the product into market. My involvement advanced into a product design position in charge of understanding every moving piece around the software.

I feel that I’ve grown tremendously within the context of product design, here are a few intrinsic learnings during my time:

Prioritization and designing at lightspeed. This industry has a few competitors each with unique specialties so it was important create innovative features and highlight the advantages over the competitors. It was imperative to learn and understand the developer tools and libraries to mediate the feasibility of designs in order to establish a frictionless design handoff.

Understanding your team are the users too. The value in working with a smaller scale team is that we had the ability to establish new practices for greater efficiency with little/no bureaucracy. This provided a great learning opportunity for me to reach out to the developers to find out what causes disruptions and be able to strategize and experiment new practices in order to achieve faster development cycles.

Simple features are still intricate and often overlooked. I have a much greater appreciation for the craft of design. Simple interactions made by the user still require a lot of thought and consideration in order to be intuitive. Details like making behaviourisms consistent goes a long way when interacting with a software.

Design Process

Sprints

Our team operated on bi-weekly sprints with weekly releases. The design work would always be worked on in advance and would often get previewed during the daily tailgates or design review sessions. The pace of weekly releases complemented our iterative methodology especially for our machine learning algorithm that required variable testing.

Prior to sprint meetings, I would host sprint planning meetings to organize with the product owner the goals for the sprints and form epics to make the objectives focused and achievable.

Prepwork

When a new epic gets added to the roadmap, I create user stories and add them to a spreadsheet to help aid the wireframing phase and provide a document for the development team to reference when they do test integrations. Proceeding this, I begin setting up my Figma designs using a template to keep my work organized. It consists of separated sticky notes for quick action to-do's, questions that I might have in an upcoming design review meeting, higher-level goals that may not be feasible and sections in which my designs or specific use cases would belong. I found this extremely useful by keeping the designs consistent so that the developers look at a common layout for each epic.

A template layout to start the design process — The design template on Figma that I began with for every new epic.

Designs

With all the prepwork done, I begin drafting an interface and prototype on Figma while receiving feedback along the way. In another file, I maintained a user flow diagram to convey the detail of certain actions or behaviours so that it won’t get missed during review sessions or handoff. This also provided as a guide for onboarding new people onto the team to better understand the app from a user's perspective. Towards the end of this phase is when the work gets reviewed. I found this phase the best opportunity to receive feedback to discover any edge cases or errors in the designs. Once reviewed and approved, I would correct any revisions and add a separate section for Developer Details- an area for developers to see other use cases such as: error states, user flows, responsiveness screens etc.

A user flow chart that describes the scenarios of where users can end up in the Nova software — A simplified user flow chart that conveys the start and end points of a user session.

Customer Insights

Our original customer base for Fire AI was fitted to a typical user who might be a manager to a team for an organization or drone pilots themselves. For the managers, our research found that file management was their most important quality to have. The drone pilots asked for an intuitive system of achieving their goals as they must operate during nightshifts when they are weary and sleepy. So a user flow consistently involved minimizing the number of clicks and restraining from actions buried behind menus that might require several clicks than needed.

When the software rebranded into Nova, the common user became a mixture of our existing userbase as well as first-time drone users who may not have the nightshift condition. Some could carry out WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) navigations and actions but may not be an expert when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. With this understanding, I made an emphasis of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interfaces and the proximity principle during the entirety of my design work. Oftentimes with feature-rich software, it needs a static interface that acts as a toolbar to activate a particular action. While this supports the many tools, it was too common for a user to forget their state of a tool or need to recollect their thoughts after an action.

The Results

The app now has the core set of features that was envisioned from the start of my time and there's still plenty of growth and potential for the app.

For the business:

A feature-rich software that performs and supports more features than all the competitors combined
The release of an open beta environment where we had the privilege to experiment with new approaches to enhance the user experience by listening to consumer feedback
The creation of a marketing team to conduct consumer outreach, now services to over a dozen states using the platform for the suppression of wildfire and continuous monitoring of natural disaster impacts

We just turned a 5 day fire into a 2 day fire cause the dudes on the engines had accurate hot spot maps to seek and destroy with

You would not believe how impressed the State of {location} guys are with what I am doing down here on my fires

Worked great, easy to navigate. Matched the hotspots up with the fire we had a few years ago.

For my career growth:

The opportunity to lead a development team of upwards to six developers with my designs
The liberty to direct a rebrand and define the direction of marketing material
Emphathize and understand the chemistry of how a team operates
Undergo the management of two co-op students

Retrospective Thoughts

I was originally hired on as a designer which has outgrown beyond what I would have predicted. I feel deeply grateful for the opportunity to be able to work on a software in an undiscovered industry; the receptive feedback our clients and stakeholders we received; and the cumulative efforts the team made to produce up to this point. It was exciting that we commonly had more ideas we wanted to create than the ability to produce them and I feel a level of appreciation for this situation. My most valuable takeaway was the enjoyment of connectedness and journey of teamwork to create a meaningful product.