Challenge

Ultimately, we needed to balance the unique needs of a wide array of different individual projects with maintaining a strong focus on generalized, multi-mission use-cases. For example, some of our customers were project managers without much CAD experience, not engineers. With that in mind, we had to balance how the UI met the experience level of both user groups.

Similarly, we needed to design for both HoloLens and web interfaces separately while still maintaining a cohesive identity and user experience. This cross-platform nature of ProtoSpace meant that we needed to consider much more than just the 2D screen experience. For example, some teams collaborated from small, remote home offices while their on-lab colleagues worked in a vast cleanroom environment assembling spacecraft. The two spaces presented very different lighting conditions and spatial constraints that we needed to solve for.

Finally, designing for new technology like the holographic display and gesture-based interactions of the HoloLens 2 has fundamentally different constraints than designing for typical screens and the web. For example, new constraints we had to consider included translucent darks, “oil-slick” display imperfections, lower resolution, limited field of view, spatial awareness, prototype scale conversions, depth, and composition in physical space.