Making Digital Maps 30x Faster
Web App Design — Product Design — Designing for 3D
An example of the Mach9 Digital Surveyor tool viewing a map with LiDAR and annotations (Mach9)
TLDR —
Making accurate high-fidelity maps takes time, especially when dealing with multiple data types and forms of labeling. Why label maps by hand when you can let machine learning do the heavy lifting? Enter Mach9’s Digital Surveyor: one of the first tools of its kind that uses perception to label maps.
While several manual tools exist on the market, Mach9 set out to create a geospatial production tool able to automatically extract 3D features from imagery and lidar data together, all the while remaining OEM-agnostic. This project details how I assisted with end-to-end design for this mapmaking tool, generating key human-in-the-loop workflows to build 3D maps better and faster.
My Role
Freelance product designer responsible for in-depth research, and end-to-end design of the mapmaking experience across the platform
Team
1 product designer, 1 product manager, and 2-3 full-stack engineers @ Mach9. I also worked closely with their annotations team for UX research purposes.
Timeline
6 weeks for initial design audit + initial recommendations (Dec 2022). I’ve served as an ongoing design consultant since, assisting with UX research, workflow design, and interaction design.