The client is in the process of establishing a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of satellites to bring high-speed internet to the world.
As part of establishing that network, when satellites are launched, an antenna has to be installed on the ground to enable an internet service provider, government or private entity to access the network.
The manufacturing and installation partners working with our client were building several antenna variations, and my team was asked to define the UX for installers.
Training and assistance during satellite antenna installation are dependent on a variety of environmental and astronomical factors that are hard to predict and change even after the site survey.
Due to this complexity, Antenna Field Engineers sometimes require multiple trips, and it's difficult, even with experience, to get it right in one visit. This is further compounded when the installation site moves, such as ships, or remote locations, in areas with no cellular coverage.
To solve this problem, the client's Terrestrial Engineering team approached us.
How can we make installers succeed in the field and serve them even when they are remote and offline?
How can the other stakeholders, who are hoping for a successful inspection, stay informed?
A collection of things that I took charge of at various stages during the project.
Understanding the people and world of Sat-comms infrastructure
Being completely new to the world of Sat-Com installations, I had to build an understanding first. I had designed an app to enable fieldwork, but this was a completely new realm. The users and variables would be totally alien to me. So to chart the uncharted, we had planned by making time for contextual inquiries.
The investigation was done in the form of visits and interviews. We visited the client's engineering labs, and we met with stakeholders who brought us face to face with installers and the complexities they faced. I also saw some sites to understand how challenging the work was. For example, our SME walked us down to a marina and showed us how tricky and complicated it can be to enable the internet through sat-com links.
The life of an installer is very nomadic. They have a crew of people most times, a variety of skilled installers. Some nations had larger units of more diverse education, skills and backgrounds. Installers in some countries were cross-trained and generally paid more. Installers in other nations were typically more educated than their peers and delegated more physical jobs to specialists. For example, in India, the installer crew consisted of the User Terminal Engineer (UT is another word for Satellite Antenna). And almost always had a welder on the team who fabricated mounts and frames to mount large Antenna.
Some of the customers also provided specialists like electricians on the day of the site survey or the installation. This information was essential to understand that we were not focusing on a persona. We were designing for the whole crew at times. Shown here is a Persona of a Crew.
After understanding their role and the dynamics of their position, we also spent time understanding their installation journey, and I explain that further on the next tab.
It is vital to call out the most essential ingredient to making installers successful: understanding what a user terminal (Sat-com Antenna) is, how it works, and why it is crucial to install it correctly. For this, we had some conversations with the engineers designing the UT.
They gave us a tour of the UT lab, and we did workshops with them to fully understand what complexities cause installations to succeed or fail. Once we saw the actual UT, it was much clearer that this was not some DishTV/TataSky antenna. Instead, it was a motorized self-positioning unit that literally needed to follow the stars. Getting it to do so was very complex. It was essentially a hardware installation, followed by a software handshake, adorably named "first sign of life."
Armed with is information, we were much more confident going into journey mapping and brainstorming.
Shown here is how I used the findings from the contextual touchpoints to build a map to capture the details of sat-com installation and how they are correlated. This is shown for site surveys, but other journey phases include planning, installation, post-installation, and service visits.
When we were conducting our research, I created a blank journey canvas on Miro. To this canvas, I added all the learnings as we gained access to this knowledge. The Journey was mapped over three weeks, and incrementally with every finding, the map grew.
This 'incremental' approach to journey mapping was only in response to me coping with the information-rich sessions we were having as I was working alone. What made this approach effective for others to read and consume was that I also indicated the inter-links between information as shown here.
Taking this approach, it was possible to take one problem and see all the associated moving parts. This allowed us to elevate the quality of HMWs to have a certain restraint in the way they directed brainstorms.
For the service designer, this became a straightforward way to trace the authorities of those moving parts on their service maps and design ways to address downstream problems.
The current journey canvas was then evolved to create the future-state map, and this focused on the future experience and how we could solve some of the problems along the way. Finally, I inserted the low fidelity wireframes into the journey to visually articulate how the future of the experience may pan out.
I created concepts to test with installers and additional stakeholders, especially those supporting an installer during the installation. Ideas were a diverse mix of physical, digital and mixed reality. These ideas are driven by the pains and the How-Might-We statements from the journey mapping stage.
These concepts were used in workshops with the stakeholders to develop more ideas that could further provide a wider pool of ideas to work with.
The below wireframe shows how considerations were made for guiding installers during their installations and keeping them on top of their schedules.
A great mix service designers and Satcom engineers made this project a total joy.
The depth of our enquiry at the start allowed the business to revisit the training design for Installers. It also enabled the UT unit to become a vehicle for carrying installation instructions. Furthermore, they had a clear vision of how technology can help installers to succeed at their job.
