Tony Poor

In the 1960s, the public was absolutely captivated by NASA. Fast-forward to today: shuttle launches have stopped, and most people don’t know very much about NASA’s current endeavors. NASA looked to our team of master’s students to utilize International Space Station data and help bring them back into the public’s eye. As design lead for this team, I drove the design of ISS Watch, an iPad app that aims to educate and excite American youth about the station and space exploration in general.

After strategizing with NASA to narrow our target user group to high school students, we conducted/synthesized two months of extensive research with students, education professionals, and NASA flight controllers. I then led several brainstorming sessions involving over a dozen stakeholders, utilizing techniques that encouraged my team to question constraints and build off of each others’ ideas. By encouraging quantity over quality, we generated over 120 early concepts before narrowing to four and working with NASA to determine which single concept made the most strategical sense to pursue.

That idea, ISS Watch, evolved through five iterations of constantly increasing fidelity (starting from scanned sketches on an iPad up to a fully working prototype fed by real data). Over these iterations, usability concerns from our student participants became less common than curious questions about the station and excited requests for more content. We considered this a huge signal of success: one of our goals, after all, was to create a tool that generated interest in space and science. The final design included four major sections:

• A real-time schedule of astronaut activities, with the ability to tap in and view educational descriptions and media of activities being performed onboard the station.
• An expedition section that details the station’s current expedition, including experiments and crew.
• A media gallery of high-resolution photos and videos from the station.
• A collapsible left-hand panel that drives home real-time aspects of the station with a station tracker, a real-time video feed of Earth from the ISS, and constantly updating news articles and astronaut tweets.

The first version of the application, built directly from our prototype, will be released to the App Store soon.