NASA Datanauts

Unifying the visual design of Open NASA's online tools and products.

USER INTERFACE DESIGN

As a companion to Open NASA and the NASA Space Apps Challenge, the Datanauts program targets people from a wide variety of backgrounds, introducing them to NASA's open data sets and teaching a variety of skills for both beginners and advanced data scientists. Each class of Datanauts is limited to 50 people, fostering mentorship, enabling collaboration and effective communication.

Datanauts begins with participants selecting a track to start working on developing their skills. It was important to clearly show progress within the tracks and designate lesson steps. Flags and bars clearly label the skill level and show a participant their progress. 

After developing their skills, Datanauts can select a mission challenge to work on. This type of challenge is similar to the kind of challenges participants might solve during the Space Apps Challenge. For that reason, it was important for Datanauts to share visual components from Space Apps. Many Datanauts graduates go on to participant in the NASA Space Apps Challenge. 

Because Datanauts class size is limited for the purpose of collaboration and technical support, it was important for participants to see a list of whom they were working with. They are able to see the class features people from a diverse background and interests with the option to contact any of them. Mentors are designated, so participants know who to contact for help.