Bedrock Ocean Exploration uses autonomous underwater robots to quickly and efficiently map the ocean floor. Their goal is to make high-quality seafloor data accessible to help industries like offshore wind, maritime security, and port management.They asked us to help them revamp their information architecture after discovering a new business opportunity during the Beta launch of their data product, prompting a pivot in direction. The team found themselves forcing new patterns and features into an existing design system originally focused on file management, with an emphasis on viewing and organizing files on a map. As the product shifted toward survey planning, important functionality was poorly emphasized, creating a confusing experience. User testing revealed that users struggled to find key screens or took inefficient paths, confirming the need to revisit the user journey before adding new features.

One of the first things we did was a journey map of the entire survey planning process. We wanted to understand what pieces of the product were still being heavily used and which ones could be tucked away. We paid close attention to third party tools to understand what context they would need as they jumped between our platform and other screens. Here is what we learned:

Certain steps had to happen in a certain order for the plan generation to work properly, therefore we needed a system that would guide the user through the survey planning process. 
The primary user had also changed, so there wasn’t a need to be switching between organisations anymore, meaning we could free up the global nav bar to be focused to a single organisation.
Files would still need to be managed, but it would no longer be the central use case, but rather a supportive one. This meant it could live in its own secondary section.

Survey Planning is now the central focus of the app, with file management and exploration have been given their own dedicated space. We decided step one was to reduced the cognitive load, and move all of the inputs into a tailored, step by step experience. The primary action we want users to take is create a plan, so we have one single, bold call to action. Using a sidebar panel that walks the user through a sequence of screens to create a plan step by step.

Old version

Updated version

We were able to move everything into a single panel, with the relevant information displaying based on whatever action the user is currently taking. This allowed us to get rid of the right hand panel as well as the widgets on the map.
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