Comprehensive Asset Planning Tool for the US Coast Guard
About Project
Note: This project is under strict NDA and For Official Use Only, so I will be sharing limited deliverables and content for this project.
Problem
The US Coast Guard has a lot of resources to manage to ensure prompt arrival upon various countries for events. Planning for such events requires careful coordination among members of large, distributed teams. Currently, the Coast Guard relies on multiple information sources causing fragmentation, leading to suboptimal decisions for planning.
Solution
Design and deliver a centralized navigation planning tool to facilitate all operational navigation planning to prevent the US Coast Guard from having to shift between multiple information sources. This will ensure situational context is retained as the US Coast Guard can navigate within a single planning tool.
Impact
21%
Asset delays
9%
Overbooking maintenance
User Personas
User Flow
After conducting user interviews with the Coastguard to get a better idea of their workflow and use journey for planning Coastguard operations, I devised the following workflow:
Wireframes
I sketched out initial wireframes to help me visualize the core pieces of the user interface.
Prototyping & Testing
Here are some iterations of the design through continuous testing and user feedback:
We found that Coastguard users wanted the ability to add Assets (e.g., cutters, aircrafts, people/operations) so there would be a prepared list to select from when the asset needed to be utilized in the plan.
Then, we learned that there are a lot of different types of statuses for assets, hence why we added the ability for users to create and define a legend.
We created the regional view of the plan to show which assets were in which region across time and found that they wanted the plan to display by quarter.
Through additional feedback, we found the user needed filters for:
TACON (tactical use and assignment)
time zone / date - filter by UTC time zone (regions filtered by their time zone to holistically see events happening in order) or by date.
The Coastguard team also wanted a view based on Assets to have a simple view of the status and assignments for each asset across time.
The next iteration, includes the sector of each asset as users needed the additional context of the asset's sector.
UI Design - Map Feature
Map for Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ)
After handling the core needs of the Regional View and Asset View, the Coast Guard mentioned their strong need to be able to view Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).
Initial Strategy: We displayed the Map into two different views, one for Coverage, and one for Asset route, similar to how we have a Regional View and Asset View for the planner, assuming the user wanted two different views and we assumed it'd be less overwhelming.
Coverage View
Asset Route View
However, we also conducted user testing with the design below to test if combining both views would be too overwhelming for the user.
Insights
We learned that combining both the 'Coverage View' and 'Asset Route' view was not overwhelming the user.
Actually, it proved to be more helpful, because users conveyed that seeing both the operation and the assets at the same time provided the additional context for the assignment of the asset in specific EEZ zones.
Lessons Learned
The value is in the details and really understanding the technical context of your users.
Don't blindly follow heuristics, heuristics are context dependent.
There are many ways to visualize information, it is very crucial to understand what are the key data points and the hierarchy of importance for each data point.