Nokia R&D Platform
1.1
Overview
Bell Labs is the industrial research arm of Nokia. We helped further their research by creating a platform that consolidates and visualizes data sources across many experiments and campaigns.
Since this is an R&D tool, we focused almost purely on usability, only adding polish for external facing demo screens and primary areas of the application.
Note: Portions of the UI are redacted and this case study is purposefully vague to avoid sensitive information.
2.1
User Needs
Being that this is an internal tool, the Nokia team was both client and user. We worked closely with the team to make sure the platform fits their needs.
The work we did was heavily constrained by integrations, internal tools, and workflows, for example, experiment names were pulled from an existing system. The format didn't seem intuitive, ex: “2018-02-01-05-30-06-2452”, but the Nokia team knew how to read it. Our approach was to keep the existing process intact, adding functionality rather than changing processes.
3.1
UX
We focused on speed and ease of use, letting the Bell Labs team focus on their research rather than the platform, and save precious seconds in each interaction.
The dashboard includes a high-level overview with helpful shortcuts to active and recently opened work. Throughout the platform, the main sidebar adapts to show the most relevant content and navigation paths, keeping things centralized and easy to use.
3.2
... Data Visualization
The most critical part was the data visualization. It linked together many data sources, plotted on a single timeline.
Users can adjust the size of each page section, scrub, adjust playback speed, expand or collapse sources, add labels, download filtered data, and so on.
4.1
Thoughts
My favorite part was the data visualization. The density & complexity of data and functionality was a fun challenge, and it was something different than the usual projects we do. It felt like designing a desktop app rather than a web platform.
5.1
Credits
- Cameron SageyUI / UX
- AP ViitanenProject Lead, Development