Explorations in NASA’s Interface Design
Tooltips, Multi-Modal Musings and Beyond
--
If you recall from my last article, I’m attempting to improve the design for ground control software that manages space vehicles during space missions.
My aim is to create holographic displays but before something as novel as that it is necesarry to start with somethings much closer to what is currently being used so I can learn practical design systems and be immersed in the current culture of design in aerospace. So I’m going to design a multimodal interface using a voice assistant. But beforethis I’ve identified one of three possible UX/UI issues to address with NASA’s Open Source Mission Control Technology (MCT).
The issue at hand here is how the text is appearing relative to the bar graphs in the Time strip, a user interface element showing events planned for execution. The designer made a recommendation to clip the length of the text to the length of the bar graph. To build on this, one approach could be to add a tool tip functionality. Essentially this displays more textual information when the use hovers their mouse over a given part of the , .. interface.
Here I’ve used Figma to implement a Tooltip style I saw supported by the Astro UX Design System. It removes extra text that can’t fit in the length of the bar graph. Other improvements could be doing a right alignment of the graph item titles, decreasing the arc the human eye has to transition through to visually couple the text label with the colored rectangle. Another advantage of this would be enabling the reduction of grey surface area in the column holding the graph item titles. Which might solve the original problem 75% of the time because more area…
