IBM Case Study Thumbnail

IBM Telescope Controller

Jan 2021 - April 2021

Project Context

IBM has an ongoing partnership with IllinoisTech to develop a Telescope Controller Software. The project is divided into multiple teams, I was part of the Swift team. For our project duration, I specifically focused on further developing the new SwiftUI UI for MacOS.

  • Zawad Sadaf - UX Designer and Developer
  • Ron Lynn- Team Advisor
  • Kenny Bunnel - Team Lead & Backend Engineer
  • Anthony Lim & Eduardo Damaso - Image Processing Team

Problem

The old Cocoa MacOS UI of the project was very confusing, but luckily some progress was made before I started on the project as we were on the process of migrating from the old cocoa UI (shown left) to the new SwiftUI interface using an old design (shown right) as perspective

Old vs Planned UI
Coca to SwiftUI
Previous Cocoa Interface vs New SwiftUI Interface

Research

With the current progress made so far and using the , we decided to layout all the initial feature we wanted to work on.

User Story
This is a rough layout of the feature requirements. Unfortunately, I did not document this process for my case study later on*

Design

Since we did have start with an inital layout, I decided to brainstorm a rough layout of all the other features we decided on and how we might integrate them with the new  SwiftUI interface. I presented it to the advisor and team lead to figure out feasibility since I was still not familiar with SwiftUI by then.

This is a close representation of what I presented to them. Unfortunately, I did not document this process for my case study later on*

Based on the feedback, I created a mini prototype that was based on the sample UI to share it with our team lead for UI changes before we start development

Development Process

I worked directly with the back-end developer for iterative updates to the user interface.

Final Product*

This is the final UI for our semester.

Final Thoughts

This was the start of my UX journey, there were a lot of things I would have done differently if I restarted the project again, but I am glad that my journey started nonetheless. There was a lack of focus on usability testing and heuristic evaluation on the tool when I worked on the interface so that is something that can be looked further into with the ongoing development of the tool in future semesters.

Zawad Sadaf Portfolio