Through a series of engagements with NASA, Blink is helping make data more accessible, easier to find and faster to use, for scientists, educators, students, science enthusiasts and the general public.
NASA's Earth Science Division develops, launches and operates a coordinated fleet of over 50 satellites, missions and instruments for long-term observations of our planet. In other words, NASA gathers massive quantities of data that enable an improved understanding of the Earth as an integrated system.
Data collected by NASA are public and must be distributed in a way that is easily accessible for users to enable research that will answer fundamental science questions about the Earth, deliver sound science to decision-makers, and inspire the next generation of scientists.
NASA recognized that accessing this huge amount of data is difficult. For scientists to work across data sets, a common component of doing innovative groundbreaking research, they must navigate a disparate collection of websites and tools which often have poor user experiences, which are time and labor intensive and not intuitive to use.
NASA collects 7 terabytes a day, from over 50 satellites, missions and instruments focused on our planet from space.
It has over 30 petabytes of data in archive, all free for public use.
In 2017, 3.2 million people downloaded scientific data from NASA's databases.
With this in mind, NASA came to Blink with the goal of making it easier for scientists to find, download, and use data across these sites and tools. With the ultimate goal being to enable scientific advances and discoveries to happen faster, our UX journey began by wanting to remove barriers to accessing this data.
Kevin Murphy, NASAWith the ultimate goal to enable scientific advances and discoveries to happen faster, our UX journey began by wanting to make accessing this data as simple as possible. We began by creating consistency in both usability and the user experience across our twelve national data distribution centers, through extensive user research and evidence-driven design.”
Through a series of strategy, research, and design projects over the past five years, Blink has helped NASA better understand their users' needs and motivations. Data and educational websites are now more intuitive, consistent across NASA, and intuitive for individual user needs.
Challenge
Solution
Transform raw data into usable & useful information making analysis more efficient
When scientists can easily access, download and work with large data sets, they're able to invest more time in interpretation and discovery.
A
B
C
Doesn't like having to use the GUI. While the level of effort might greatly decrease, they're still not happy about it.
Effort
Emotion
Finding
Evaluating
Downloading
Today, Blink's evidence-driven design work has expanded into a multi-year effort to understand and improve the UX of several scientific tools and data sets across Earth Sciences.
For NASA, taking an evidence-driven design approach has changed the way they serve their scientists, as they drive towards transforming their understanding of the Earth in fundamental ways. They have also made progress aligning distributed teams around user needs and to create a unified NASA experience.