Cape Drone App

Background

Cape is a drone tech company that started out as a video service for those skiing or snowboarding down the mountain and eventually became the "fly remotely" platform governments and businesses rely on.

The Project

Before working with Cape, they were scrambling to combine & connect tools that can capture payments, get customers registered, and the filmed onsite. This was a painful process that didn’t scale when it came to training or for large amount of customers wishing to use cape. As a result Cape looked for help to design and build a mobile application that can combine all these services into a single application that can then be distributed to all Cape locations across the globe.

The Problem

Introduce a way to handle every aspect of operations offline and in the field.

My Role & The Team

Lead designer and product manager working with another designer and six engineers from November 2015 to August 2016.

Background

Cape reached out to me to help design and build a mobile solution to manage field operations in a single application.

Previously cape was having to navigate through numerous apps in the field as well as handle paperwork. This was non optimal given the time sink this was causing as well as the overhead causing the business.

Exploring

App structure

During kickoff we began wireframing the app's architecture and outlining technical requirements. As we realized the scope and technical issues on the drone operator side, we decided to focus on getting customer management part of the app drafted first then setup navigation to support various operator roles later on.

Iterating

iOS iteration

With these tech spikes underway on the drone operator side, we decided to shift focus to getting the customer management side design & built out first.

Few key areas this needed to handle was managing reservations on site, adding/managing customer records, dealing with new customer waivers, and taking payments remotely. In addition to building out these capabilities we needed to also support storing data created locally on each device given environmental constraints. A feat that was not easy especially on waiver and payment management side.

During this process I worked closely with internal employees and those in the field to define the various pain points needing to address in this MVP.

Drone Operator MVP

With the customer management side of the app underway we then began building out the interface to manage drones flying in the field. One of the key principles we focused on for this part of the app was automation. How can we set things up to quickly be executed onsite with almost no work needed. As a result we built a way that admins can create "rails" that drone operators can execute a drone to fly through with minimal control. Also for the drone operator side we built a way for the operator to quickly go through a checklist and execute commands to easily manage there tasks.

Handheld Camera MVP

As we started testing out the software in the field and getting the right in person experience down, we soon realized a key piece wanting to add was the ability to manage a handheld camera that can communicate with the customer management tool. Reason needing to pull customer management data was primarily to support mapping the recordings to the customer in the videos.

During this exploration phase we tried a few different cameras. The first being a GoPro that paired with the app via bluetooth. The second camera we tried was the DJI Osmo, which included gimble support and easier pairing with our app. The moment we paired the DJI Osmo we knew we had a winner.

Outcome

During this several month process we got to a pretty solid MVP that has been stress tested in rough enviroments and unique customer senarios. Once the issues came to a minimum we shifted our sights on getting to a stable production build. I helped Cape at this point get a private app deployment enviroment in place as well as QA process in to make sure we can release stable tested builds out.

Post launch

Accomplishments

- Delivered a v1 version of the the mobile application in just under a year
- Successfully integrated DJI hardware into the application
- Delivered a mobile device provisioning solution for Cape to manage devices in the field

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