Mapper.ai
2017 - 2019
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Motion Design Contractor > Design Lead
Mapper.ai was a startup building machine-readable maps (MRMs) and point cloud data tools to accelerate the acquisition, validation, and deployment of data for autonomous vehicle applications.
I joined as a contractor and earned my way to Design Lead in under two years, a reflection of the trust the team placed in my work and my ability to grow into whatever the organization needed next. That meant spanning UX, product, brand, and operational design, often simultaneously, at startup pace.
UX, Product, & Brand Design
CES 2018 BOOTH ANIMATION
Mapper's CES presence needed to communicate the value of its MRM technology and autonomous vehicle applications to a convention floor full of competing noise. I designed and produced a looping animation for the front of the booth that distilled complex technical concepts into a clear, visually compelling narrative for prospective partners and clients.
WEBSITE REDESIGN
Mapper's original site was little more than a placeholder. I led the visual language and brand direction for a full redesign, collaborating with another designer who handled layout and interaction. The result was a site that credibly represented a startup punching above its weight in the autonomous vehicle space.
ANNOTATOR
The Annotator app was the internal tool Mapper's teams used to create and edit semantic map. The core of the company's product. Working closely with engineers within system constraints, I improved the interface and UX of a highly technical tool used daily by the people building the product. Key improvements included a context-based Properties Panel that surfaced relevant tools and information based on the active annotation type, and a Layers Panel for managing and toggling point cloud characteristics in the viewport.
Interaction motion studies detailing the user flows of key functions in Annotator. Above explores lane creation and transform tools (top), and intersection zone creation and definition (bottom).
Operations & Practices
END-TO-END PIPELINE
After a critical software failure nearly derailed a demo with prospective clients, I partnered with the Lead Software Engineer to design a solution. Together we mapped the five major stages of Mapper's pipeline from capture operations to software performance, and built a testing framework to catch critical failures before they reached stakeholders.
The End-to-End (E2E) pipeline consisted of 5 major steps which handled everything from capture operations to software performance.
My contribution spanned the full initiative: identifying failure points, designing the testing solution, writing documentation, conducting user testing, and presenting the new standards to the team. The result was a meaningful improvement in product quality and a wiki that gave the entire team a shared, reliable reference for pipeline operations which hadn't existed before.
When done, we had a helpful wiki for educating our team on the proper methods of testing and handling the many steps of our pipeline. Such as the proper way to mount and un-mount our mapping device from the car.