Vella Go GUI
Velodyne Lidar
2022
UI/UX Design Lead
Legacy interface gap closed, Context switch-free design
Velodyne Lidar was a Silicon Valley-based lidar technology company providing sensors for use in autonomous vehicles, advanced driver-assistance systems, mapping, robotics, infrastructure, and smart city applications.
Velodyne was acquired in early 2023.
The Challenge
Velodyne's sensor configuration interface hadn't been meaningfully updated since 2005. Built by firmware engineers to serve a functional need, configuration options and live diagnostics were intermingled with no information hierarchy, crammed into a fixed box that ignored most of the available screen. Users, who mainly consisted autonomy engineers, researchers, and fleet operators, had built workarounds around its limitations and had low tolerance for unnecessary change. The redesign had to earn their trust while adding meaningful new capabilities they didn't yet have.
The original configuration interface before my design solution
Making the Case
The defining moment of this project wasn't the design itself but rather getting engineering aligned on it. When the engineering team presented their own layout proposal, I ran a structured A/B comparison in our next sync, framing each approach by its underlying design goal:
Task-Specific (my proposal, left): Controls and visualization on a single screen, no context switching, configuration changes visible against live sensor output in real time.
Domain-Specific (engineerings' proposal, right): Information organized by operational category, requiring users to move between views to accomplish a single task.
The task-specific layout won on clear, defensible grounds by matching the mental model of tools with tried and tested UI paradigms; 3D modeling software and design canvases. They also eliminated the context switching that had been the core usability failure of the legacy interface.
The Solution
Outcomes
The redesign met every user goal established at the outset and was presented to stakeholders across product, marketing, firmware, and software teams. The prototype demonstrated the complete core user flow end-to-end, and the product was in active internal review at time of departure with 15 engineers aligned on the final direction.