NASA Worldview Redesign

A Refreshed Dashboard and Analysis Module

Designing for situational awareness

The redesigned Worldview UI was driven by established GIS layout good practices. "Floating islands" containerize fundamental GIS tools like navigation controls, keeping them accessible without competing with the map canvas for attention. The design is compliant with NASA's Stellar Design System and Brand Guidelines, grounding the prototype in the enterprise ecosystem it would actually live in.

Iconography selection, information clustering, and a card-based system emerged through heuristic evaluation and iterative user feedback. These weren't cosmetic changes. Each decision aimed to increase situational awareness: helping users understand where they are in their workflow and what actions are available without hunting through nested menus.

Giving Worldview an analysis brain

The biggest feature addition was a new analysis module. GIS research and remote sensing community trends identified key analysis types that users needed: watchbox monitoring, temporal comparison, change detection, coincident imagery, and spectral analysis. Each analysis becomes a shareable card that automatically configures the needed layers, reducing the setup burden that often derails non-expert users.

Another major usability finding drove a critical design iteration: geospatial analysis types were not familiar to many testers. Instead of burying options in a dropdown, I designed a full menu with visual previews that provided context for each analysis type before users committed to selecting one.

Usability tests included a data journalist, GIS professionals, and design students, giving me signal across different expertise levels.

Extending Worldview Through Service Design

From "when and where" to "who"

Phase 1 gave Mikayla the ability to answer when environmental events happened and where. But the next logical question in her investigation was who is responsible for the nighttime fishing activity. That question couldn't be answered with government satellite imagery alone.

Commercial satellite providers have rapidly proliferated, and their datasets are insight treasure troves. Phase 2 explored what it would look like to integrate commercial data sources into Worldview as a new service layer, focusing on RFGeo as an example product. RFGeo identifies and locates vessels from space by detecting their signal emissions, which would let Mikayla correlate the light signatures she found in nighttime imagery with actual ship identifications.

Mapping the service ecosystem

Designing this integration required thinking beyond UI. I developed a service design blueprint that identified new backstage players and touchpoints: commercial data license management and verification, authorized dataset layer menus, new data visualization formats for vector tessellation, and third-party data streaming availability.

The blueprint mapped the full flow from Mikayla revisiting her Worldview dashboard, verifying her commercial data license, selecting and loading the RFGeo dataset, discovering new insights by associating ship lights with signal identifications, and saving her findings to share with her editorial team.

Friction points became design opportunities

A user journey map captured Mikayla's updated mental model for working with the new data source. Friction points revealed concrete opportunities to improve touchpoint designs: situational awareness indicators like "Last accessed XX:XX PDT by XYZ," green verification states for active licenses, preview capabilities for unfamiliar commercial layers, and optimized rendering for large vector datasets.

The competitive analysis positioned Worldview's proposed service against other platforms in the ecosystem, clarifying the value proposition: fusing commercial data into Worldview empowers users to make better decisions in environmental monitoring and resource management, with 10+ commercial remote sensing providers accessible through optimized big-data vector workflows on a persistent online platform.