Skytango provide drone pilots with a platform to receive job offers, and drone footage customers with a resource of licensed operating drone pilots in the area. The project was to design the user interface for a drone pilot app.
The initial challenge was to get up to speed on exactly what the core functionality of the app is and why it is needed. As there was very little documentation available to gain a better understanding of the app I had to build a good working relationship with the client. I needed to understand exactly what it is they wanted the app to do, how it should look and more importantly what elements they did not want.
I was struggling with space in first two revisions of the project, there was a lot of data to present and it needed to be easy to read and interact with. As the project progressed I came to realise that the app would almost certainly be used in a landscape setting rather than portrait. This was a 'turning point' in the design as it gave us a lot more horizontal space to work with, while still having the option of vertical scroll if need be.
Early on in the project I created a full set of wireframes for the main pages of the app. These were useful for myself and the team to begin to visualise what content should be on each of the pages.
However I omitted these from the first presentation to the client a skipped straight to an Invision prototype using high fidelity mock ups. By doing this the client could really understand what they were looking at and so give me accurate honest feedback. This proved very valuable in progressing the project along at a rapid pace.
Interacting with the prototype helped the client see issues with user flow that and page specific functionality that they hadn't considered to this point. This opened up the lines of communication and we really began to work on the apps flow and information architecture. The ascetic feedback I got feedback was that they wanted the design to be cleaner. I then created a second prototype based on the feedback from all the stakholders.
Seeing as this product is the first of its kind and the industry is barly a decade old, it can be quite hard to find existing data. I needed to find out what the pilots wanted out of a app, what were their frustrations and motivations. I conducted a survey and contacted all the registed dron pilots in Ireland and got over 30% sucess rate. Below are some of the results I obtained.
As a result of the survey and pilot interview I was able to build an acurate drone pilot persona. I also conducted interview and user observations using an invision prototype.
