Improving Iconography for NASA Mission Scheduling

Overview

Background

This project was completed alongside Playbook’s constraints feature improvement. Icons play a key role in Playbook in that they must clearly and concisely express key functionalities and features to users. In this project, my mission was to redesign Playbook’s icons with a more consistent and intuitive iconography language.

New vision

I wanted Playbook’s icons to prioritize the following principles:

Visibility. Icons should appear clear and unique even at small sizes in the UI.
Distinguishability. Icons should be quickly identifiable and recognizable.
Understandability. Icons should convey their intended functionality or meaning easily to users.
Youthfulness. Icons should look fresh, friendly, and minimal.

Overall, for walk-up users, we want to ease the Playbook learning curve with icons that quickly and easily teach Playbook’s functionalities and features. For experienced users, we want to make Playbook fast and seamless to use with icons that are easy to distinguish and recognize in a complex UI.

Vision to design

Next, I explored ways to turn the new iconography vision into designs that could be applied to existing and future icons. Key design focuses included:

• Filled shapes and bold strokes for visual boldness and clarity 

• Ample white space for the eye to easily differentiate small icon elements

• Rounded corners for a friendlier, more modern look and feel

Redesigning ambiguous icons

Another major part of implementing new iconography was redesigning icons that could easily be misinterpreted, and icons that could easily be mistaken for similar-looking icons.

Final library and language

The end deliverable was a library of freshly redesigned icons, and design guidelines for creating new icons to give Playbook a more clear, modern, youthful look and feel.