MMO for EO

Satellite mission operators at Thales Alenia Space were spending an average of 40 minutes per shift navigating a legacy orchestration interface built in the early 2010s. The tool had grown through layers of feature additions, creating a fragmented information architecture that required extensive onboarding and caused frequent errors during time-critical operations. The challenge: redesign the Mission Management Orchestration (MMO) tool for Earth Observation (EO) operators — without breaking the mental models of experienced users who had been working with the system for years. The brief had one non-negotiable constraint: zero tolerance for errors that could compromise satellite integrity. This was not a consumer product. Every interaction decision had real stakes.

I ran five contextual inquiry sessions with operators across two shifts. Rather than asking what they wanted, I watched what they actually did — where eyes went first, what keyboard shortcuts they used instinctively, which error dialogs they had learned to ignore. Three patterns emerged immediately: operators treated the map view as their primary orientation anchor regardless of the task; the timeline was used reactively, not proactively; and the alert system had been tuned down by 80% of operators because it triggered too often for non-critical events.

Enterprise UX is an exercise in earning trust. Operators had been burned by redesigns before — tools that looked cleaner but made their job harder. The only way to earn credibility was to show up at their desk and watch how they worked before drawing a single wireframe. The hardest decision was removing a feature that 30% of operators said they used, after discovering through observation that no one actually used it — they just thought they did. Removing it saved 15 minutes of onboarding time per new operator. If I could redo one thing: involve engineering earlier in the constraint conversations. Two of my proposed interactions had to be descoped because the backend architecture made them prohibitively expensive. Understanding those limits earlier would have let me find creative solutions rather than compromises.