Eleken designers join Astraea's team to enhance geospatial SaaS, attracting new customers and investors

As an early-stage startup, Astraea was working toward its product-market fit

Achieving product-market fit is considered a critical milestone for startups and new products seeking to succeed in the marketplace, as it means your solultion resonates with its target customers, solves their problems, and generates enough demand and revenue to sustain a viable business.

The process of achieving product-market fit involves demonstrations to potential users and investors. For that reason, Astraea’s team needed to radically improve the quality of their product’s user interface and make it attractive, usable, and consistent. Additionally, they wanted to build tailored applications on top of their existing platform to enable specific industry verticals such as real estate, finance, agriculture, and conservation.

The vision was bold and the plans were big, but Astraea faced a roadblock in terms of a lack of design resources

• Their in-house UI designer resigned at the time they were launching several new features and needed plenty of UI work to be done on a platform.

• The design team also included two front-end engineers working in-house, but to achieve their grand goals, Astraea needed experienced UI/UX designers who could cope with a complex data-intensive application.

With so much work needed to be done as soon as possible, Astraea started exploring what options they had to get proper help.

Getting in-house experience with Eleken remote designers

As Jamie Conklin, VP of Product for Astraea said during our first call

I can come up with thousands of ideas when I work with someone, but I’m just too slow to implement them on my own. I’m definitely looking for someone I can collaborate closely with.

Jamie Conklin, VP of Product /

When you hire Eleken, our designers become a part of your team, like an in-house employee with whom you communicate directly, but work remotely. That’s why we managed to seamlessly integrate into Astraea’s team, and stay engaged and involved during the entire project.

Our work started with the iterative redesign of Earth OnDemand

Earth OnDemand is Astraea’s product that allows you to see detailed information about the selected zone, combining data from different sources of satellite imagery. You can choose which datasets you want to use: public or private.

‍The clients wanted to simplify its interface and make it more usable.

Creating designs for data-heavy applications is challenging. But our experience of working with geospatial SaaS products, like Involi and Gamaya, allowed us to choose the best UI/UX design practices and together with Astraea’s team come up with effective design decisions.

Iteration by iteration, we suggested a series of big changes that would revamp the design to fit it to the best standards of modern UX.

• To manage the overwhelming amount of information, the navigation menu is categorized, each category hiding behind an icon at the right side of the screen.

• Dark elements help to establish a visual hierarchy and highlight the key elements of the interface.

• Monitoring can be done by choosing shots on the right side of the screen or by choosing the time period on the timeline at the bottom.

Adjusting to client’s needs to deliver faster results

Though the designs we created gave all the needed improvements to the original version of Earth OnDemand, it would have taken a lot of time to implement them. To pursue their goal of meeting the product market fit, the client needed faster results to demonstrate the product to potential clients and investors.

So, we focused on the little things that require little effort, but make a lot of difference. We didn’t touch the visual style and went on with what was already there.

• Simplifying the search process. We added filters for fast sorting of information at the right.

• Maintaining a clean minimalist look. How could we do it without starting all over from the wireframes? We decided to add an option of hiding the side menu when the user wants to focus on the map. Such an elegant solution helped to visually “declutter” the interface in an instant.

Initial designs were left on hold until Astraea has enough time and resources to implement a full-scale redesign of Earth OnDemand.

After a few months of working on Earth OnDemand, Astraea started developing a new feature: Monitoring.

We were involved in the design process from the very start. In the beginning, we wanted to embed the product in the Earth OnDemand, but after some iterations decided to make it a separate unit.

Here are some interesting design ideas we implemented when designing the Monitoring page:

• Users can view available datasets in a form of a list ordered chronologically or as cards on the right side of a screen of they need more detailed information.

• Users can leave their comments on the timeline to be able to better navigate through all the information.

• The price tag is highlighted with accent orange so that a user can see how much the map will cost right away.

Getting playful with Notebook AI

EarthAI Notebook is a cloud-based code editor. You can take an image from Earth OnDemand and copy it to the notebook, thus transferring it to code. After that, an algorithm can be applied to analyze the image. For example, to find out the percentage of crops that have flourished on the field.

However, we don’t think it has to be boring and complicated. Our suggestion for its design includes little fun elements, such as rocket illustrations in the place of the loading bar.

Here are two versions of the same screen:

As well, we did over 10 different options of error pages for Astraea, with photos and custom illustrations. Here are some of them:

Customizing design for external clients from different industries

Apart from constant work on the development of Astraea products, we also got to work on a custom product for their client: Earth AI — Blackbear.

Blackbear analyzes locations and finds the best placing for solar panels. EarthAI makes such analysis as automated as possible. With the help of Earth AI — Blackbear people can see how much profit their solar panels will bring and how to reach maximum efficiency.

While designing, we had to be thinking of the future: the design should be available for usage in other products of Astraea as well as in the custom versions of the software made for their clients like Blackbear.

That is why we were trying to reuse the elements of the old interface as much as possible: this made the work of developers faster and easier.

Here’s what Mr. Conklin said at the end of our collaboration

The workflow with the Eleken team is seamless. They work as an embedded member of our team. It is unusual to find a designer who has experience building applications with geospatial data - especially imagery data. We found that in Eleken.

Jamie Conklin, VP of Product /

Designing for urgent needs

Astraea is a business with a strong feeling of purpose.

In 2022, Earth OnDemand came to an unexpected use. Together with our designers from Ukraine, they have launched a platform that provided precise satellite info for NGOs working on providing humanitarian help for the civil population of locations in Ukraine that suffered from the devastating shelling of the Russian army.

With high-resolution images provided by Satellite logic, it helps to plan logistics, taking into consideration the location of the armed forces.

In the times when all the world was #standingwithukraine, we were happy that our clients supported us in such a meaningful way.

Eleken's support with UI/UX design resulted in increased interest from investors and new businesses

One designer from Eleken was working on Astraea for over a year, adapting the design to new tasks and iterating a lot. That was a true startup spirit with all the challenges associated.

After we’ve done our best with fast and efficient decisions, Astraea got ready for big changes.

We have radically improved the quality of our user interfaces, the consistency of our design, and the ability to sell our tools… The improvements to our UI have led to new business as well as interest from investors.

Jamie Conklin, VP of Product /