UX DESIGN · SAAS · DEFENCE TECH · 2024
Designing for Orbit
Designed the GUI for satellite mission planning, translating complex spatial data into a decision-ready interface for aerospace teams.
THE CHALLENGE
Making mission-critical data readable under pressure
Make the unmakeable usable.
Defence operators needed to visualize object trajectories and their relationship to their own satellite. The existing Spaceguard interface was highly technical and hard to interpret: budget restrictions, a mandatory component library, and no user access made this one of the most constrained projects I've worked on.
THE APPROACH
A heuristic-led methodology built for a zero-access research environment
Laws over learned patterns.
Without traditional user research, I leaned on established cognitive principles: Jakob's Law and Miller's Law to reduce cognitive load, Law of Proximity and Similarity for grouping, Hick's Law for decision simplification, and Fitts's Law for interaction accessibility.
UNIQUE CONSTRAINTS
No users. No interviews. No polish budget.
Military personnel restrictions meant zero direct user access. I worked entirely from anonymized screen recordings to identify friction points, while simultaneously learning enough orbital mechanics to make sense of what I was watching.
Design Laws Applied
Jakob's Law
Users spend most of their time in other interfaces. Design to match familiar mental models to reduce the learning curve.
Miller's Law
The average person can hold 7 (±2) items in working memory. Chunked information into manageable groups throughout the UI.
Hick's Law
Decision time increases with the number of choices. Simplified menus and reduced on-screen options at every critical decision point.
Fitts's Law
Time to acquire a target is a function of distance and size. Interaction targets sized and positioned for the most common operator workflows.
The Outcome
Without direct user access, validation came from the people who knew the system best: a heuristic walkthrough with the orbital mechanics engineer and the Exotrail stakeholder, cross-referenced against the original screen recordings. The redesign mapped cleanly onto real operator workflows and resolved the friction points identified in the audit. It established a new interface standard for Spaceguard and laid the design foundation for Exotrail's future development roadmap.
