️Astro

ASTRO A mission-critical monitoring dashboard where calm is a design requirement.

Overview

ASTRO is a self-initiated design concept built around a single provocation: NASA and SpaceX build interfaces for engineers — but what if mission control were designed with the same care as a consumer product?

The scenario: a six-person crew on a lunar south pole mission, monitored by a ground team managing simultaneous feeds of health data, mission performance, and crew psychology. In an emergency, every second spent interpreting the interface is a second not spent responding to it.

Challenge

Existing mission dashboards fail under pressure. Dense tables, competing hierarchies, and inconsistent visual weight increase cognitive load at exactly the moment it needs to be lowest. There's also a dimension standard dashboards ignore entirely: morale. On long-duration missions, crew mental health is as operationally critical as oxygen levels — yet it lives in a separate system, if it's tracked at all.

Process

The design started with one question: what does the operator need to know first?

I mapped the ground team's decision tree during a simulated anomaly — what they check, in what order, and where current interfaces slow them down. That decision hierarchy, not data availability, drove every layout choice. Several early directions organized by data type — vitals together, mission metrics together. They were faster to build and easier to explain. They were also wrong. Operators don't think in data categories; they think in urgency. The layout had to reflect that.

Design Decisions

Dark mode is functional, not aesthetic — it reduces eye fatigue in low-light environments and improves data contrast at the hardware level.

The three-column layout separates concerns deliberately: left navigation organizes by decision type, the center surfaces time-sensitive KPIs as scannable cards, the right handles contextual detail that matters but doesn't demand constant attention. The hierarchy is calm by design — so that when something breaks, the break is immediately visible against a stable visual baseline.

The most deliberate choice was placing the morale score alongside physiological vitals. Not in a separate wellbeing module, not buried in a crew tab — right there, next to heart rate and oxygen. The goal was to normalize psychological monitoring as part of mission health, not treat it as a soft metric that engineers can ignore.

Outcome

User testing with designers and engineers validated the hierarchy — anomalies were identified faster and with less back-and-forth than on reference dashboards. The response that came up most consistently wasn't about speed. It was about feeling: the interface felt in control, even when the data didn't.

That's the real design goal. Not just faster decisions — a calmer operator making them.

Tools — UX Research · Information Architecture · UI Design · Data Visualization