Google Earth Engine
2015 - 2016
Background: Earth Engine is a platform for scientific analysis and visualization of geospatial datasets, for academic, non-profit, business and government users. Earth Engine hosts satellite imagery and stores it in a public data archive that includes historical earth images going back more than forty years. The images, ingested on a daily basis, are then made available for global-scale data mining. Earth Engine also provides APIs and other tools to enable the analysis of large datasets. Before this project, there was no one-stop-shop to learn all about Earth Engine and the great ways it has been empowering developers and non-profit organizations.
Goal: Assist current and would-be Earth Engine users by giving them information about the tool in a responsive, intuitive, and easy to parse format. Redesign Earth Engine's web presence and launch a new marketing-oriented site. Bring Earth Engine's website into the Google marketing design style family.
Users: Current and would-be Earth Engine users, scientists, cartographers, journalists, and university professors
My role: As the sole/lead designer, I was responsible for all UX/UI design of the site, custom illustration, user research, and product photography. There was also designated product manager for this project, so I picked up that set of responsibilities as well and worked in close collaboration with a small team of engineers.
Outcome: The Earth Engine site is live today
INSPIRE
Earth Engine allows people to combine powerful satellite imagery and their own algorithms and data to create real world applications showing patterns, correlations, and phenomenons across the globe. Earth Engine has empowered people all over the world to create truly impactful tools and visualizations, some of which have led to dramatic policy changes. I wanted the look of the new Earth Engine site and the manner the information was conveyed to be inspiring to users. I used high resolution full-bleed modules with rich Earth imagery, quotes from Earth Engine users, and a detailed case study page to achieve this. I also wanted to translate the incredibly complex explanations and applications into a form that most anyone could understand, so in many ways this was a UX writing as well as a design challenge.
PEEK INTO FEATURES
Even though this was a marketing site for the Earth Engine tool, I wanted to provide glimpses beyond the case studies into what this powerful tool was capable of. I worked with engineering to create a Timelapse page which highlights some of our top-notch Google Earth imagery in combination with a time slider. You can see ice melt, cities sprawl, and islands form.
RESPONSIVE & MOBILE FRIENDLY
From the beginning of this project, I championed, alongside engineers, that this be a full responsive, mobile friendly site. Potential Earth Engine users could be out in the field, in the classroom, or at their desk, and we needed to design a site to fit their changing contexts.
