Geospatial Event Analysis
Design Lead: User Research, UX, Visual Design
Dataminr is a real-time alerting company leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and deliver breaking events from publicly available information across the web. Their users are journalists, public sector workers, and corporate security professionals.
Problem
Corporate security analysts rely on Dataminr’s alerts to discover events that may impact their assets. Their current workflow is to receive alerts via the web app, email, or mobile notifications. They then use other tools to assess the level of impact and, if necessary, manage their response.
The back-and-forth between multiple tools is time-consuming and tedious when speed is critical.
Process
In addition to the problem stated above, the design team was also instructed to explore map-based displays of the alerts in addition to the feed Dataminr already had.
The design team began creating some conceptual wireframes to align stakeholders on the vision.
Next, we focused on discovery research to better understand what we were solving for and to validate our assumptions. We synthesized our findings and summarized our recommendations for leadership.
In between concluding our research and beginning implementation, Dataminr acquired Watchkeeper, a small startup that was a geo-visualization tool with incident management capabilities.
We had 4 months to integrate their solution into the Dataminr platform to create a combined experience. This involved aligning two different alerting systems and brands into a cohesive and intuitive experience.
The first step was to resolve the information architecture. We considered pros and cons for a variety of solutions and ultimately settled on leveraging Dataminr’s tabbed navigation and created two persistent tabs: Alert feed and Map.
I created a blueprint to map out the crossover between the Dataminr and Watchkeeper systems and identified places to link them to make the experience feel seamless.
After the user flows were defined, the next step was unifying the visual styles of Dataminr and Watchkeeper. The design team did an audit of all the components of alerts across the two systems and worked with users to prioritize the information to optimize for quick scanning. The designs need to work for both a stream of alerts in the feed and as icons and pop-ups on the map.
Outcome
Customers responded positively to the new geo-based alerting. They described the new visual style as “appealing” and “more intuitive.” The introduction of the map interface aided Dataminr’s expansion into the corporate security space, which resulted in new partnerships and more funding.