Visualizing the future of Science and Agricultural Education.
Context
10 weeks, Summer (June- August) 2020
Partnership with the St.Louis based entrepreneurial venture, MARSfarm as the primary UX/UI intern.
Consisted of the user interface design, user experience research, and web development.
The completed web application will be used a portal for students and teachers to view data about a plant’s CO2, humidity, and temperature levels, log information about the plants’ growth, view images of the plants remotely. Teachers would be able to use the application to start new experiments, plan, and organize a lesson plan.
About MarsFARM:
“MARSfarm provides educational solutions to help teachers increase student engagement with STEM. We aim to inspire students to become future problem solvers. With a long-term vision of identifying the most suitable crops for research in deep space, our kits will enable hands-on learning about everything from plant physiology to computer science while educating the next generation of problem-solvers.”
https://marsfarm.io/
Process
Followed the Agile design process, releasing parts of the interface at the conclusion of 2-week sprints.
Trello was used as a task organization tool, specifying tasks for each sprint.
Utilized Figma to create low to high fidelity prototypes.
Conducted Usability testing every 2 weeks using Maze, a user testing platform followed by in-person followups.
Design for the interface was started from scratch, starting from the ground up.
Within the design process I worked with data visualization, user information input, user analysis, and communication of text-based information.
Wireframes
Wireframe sketches: viewing options in the image gallery 
Wireframe sketches: Image gallery of in-unit plants and image comparison 
Wireframe sketches: Image gallery of in-unit plants 
Wireframe sketches: Image annotation tool
Information Architecture
View and manage in-process experiments 
Onboarding 
Home page and data visualizations
Usability Testing
Usability Testing was conducted at the conclusions of sprint 2, 3, and 4. Maze (maze.design), a remote usability testing tool, was used to collect feedback on new editions to the web interface.
Feedback from the user testing was collected and analyzed to determine which changes to implement in the next set of iterations.
Final UI Design
MarsFARM Unit Dashboard 
Setting up a new experiment: Select a recipe for the new experiment 
Setting up a new experiment: Edit the new experiment task schedule 
Setting up a new experiment: Identity locations of plant species 
Setting up a new experiment: Identity locations of plant species 
Humidity Dashboard: Last 7 days view 
Humidity Dashboard: Compare humidity and temperature 
C02 Dashboard: Compare humidity and C02 
C02 Dashboard: All time with min/max/average 
Temperature Dashboard: Temperature last 24 hours 
MarsFARM Unit experiment image gallery 
View current experiment details
Production
I created interactive data visualizations in the Atom code editor using HTML, CSS, and the Chart.js JavaScript library. The data visualizations display data directly from MARSfarm unit as it.
Below are 1 of the 15 graphs I hand-coded using a static dataset. A continuous data stream from a single MARSfarm unit will be imported when the web application is live and a unit is connect.
Nina Crosby Walton 