After roadway designers layout the horizontal geometry for the road, their next step is to edit the vertical alignment to opimize for the amount of volume they need to cut from the terrain and how much they have to fill back in. In their current workflow, roadway designers would have to draw. vertical alignments. With new technology, InfraWorks is able to provide roadway with a roughly right vertical alignment profile based on existing terrain data they can bring into their model. When the roadway designer draws their road on the surface of the terrain, Infraworks samples the vertical profile of the horizontal geometry to create a best fit profile. All the roadway designer has to do is then make manual adjustments as they see fit.
Problem
When a roadway engineer has to adjust the vertical alignment of a roadway, they needs to be able to add, remove, edit Points of Vertical Intersection (PVIs) horizontally, vertically, and along a fixed slope as well as adjusting the curve type, radius, and k-value of vertical curves, so that they can optimize their cut/fill, overhaul costs, and provide a safe driving experience.
Objective
Team Pavo's objective was to provide and improve upon industry-standard vertical alignment tools in InfraWorks.
Team Pavo's objective was to provide and improve upon industry-standard vertical alignment tools in InfraWorks.
Contribution
For this project I refactored the interaction designs from Civil3D's vertical alignment tools to fit within the context of InfraWorks, redesigned the information design for the context menus, created the in-world visual constraint guides, and conducted the concept validation and usability testing for the vertical alignment tools.
UX Process for this Project
1. Define the problem space
2. Refer to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Manual (a.k.a the AASHTO green book) to understand the technical details of vertical geometric curve design and its significance so when I talk with customers I sound some what intelligent.
3. Interview key customers about their work practice, current tools, and how they would improve upon the interface within InfraWorks.
4. Create a hypothesis.
5. Sketch a lot.
6. Hash over sketches with Team Pavo to gauge level of development effort and how to iterate on the design.
7. Schedule usability testing while functionality is built.
8. Conduct usability testing of beta functionality.
9. Iterate based on feedback.
10. Integrate into the main code base once users approved the funcationality and the functionality met our set acceptance criteria.
1. Define the problem space
2. Refer to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Manual (a.k.a the AASHTO green book) to understand the technical details of vertical geometric curve design and its significance so when I talk with customers I sound some what intelligent.
3. Interview key customers about their work practice, current tools, and how they would improve upon the interface within InfraWorks.
4. Create a hypothesis.
5. Sketch a lot.
6. Hash over sketches with Team Pavo to gauge level of development effort and how to iterate on the design.
7. Schedule usability testing while functionality is built.
8. Conduct usability testing of beta functionality.
9. Iterate based on feedback.
10. Integrate into the main code base once users approved the funcationality and the functionality met our set acceptance criteria.
Initial sketches to understand the basic vertical curve geometry and gizmo problem space.
Low Fidelity mock-ups to demonstraight and indicate how the vertex of a curve would be displayed in world.
Higher fidelity mockups demonstraighting the visuals and placement of the PVI, radius, and maintain-slope grips. This graphic also shows the maximum and minimum viable range for the vertical curve radius.
As a team we had to consider the implications of having redundant grips for curve radius functionality. This sketch is my exploration on why we only needed two instead of three. We ended up using the position of the center grip to display the vertex of the curve.
These designs show a virtual guide that conveys to the user how and where they can move the PVI as well as additional feedback when they exceed the maximum allowable slope.
When a roadway designer is editing the vertical alignment in-world, we decided we needed to provide guides and visual feedback to the designers for how the grip's movement is constrained as well as where can they put the grip wiithout exceeding the maximum allowable slope for the road way. When a roadway designer is editing the position of a PVI, the PVI is constrained in four different ways. The users either wants to mainstain the station(length location along the roadway) and adjust the elevation of the PVI. The opposite, where they need to maintain elevation and adjust the station of the PVI. There are two cases where the roadway designer needs to maintain the slope of one tangent, either incoming or outgoing. In those cases the roadway designer wants to move the grip up and down along a tangent while the other tangent adjusts. The final case is when the roadway designer doesnt really care about any of those constraints and just wants to place the PVI in roughly the right location. In that case they are adjusting both the station and elevation of the PVI at the same time.
Higher fidelity mockup showing the selected state of a PVI and the vertical curve constraint guides being displayed.
Higher fidelity mockup showing the "edit station but maintaining elevation" case for a PVI with the vertical curve constraint guides displayed.
Higher fidelity mockup showing the "edit elevation but maintain station" case for a PVI with the vertical curve constraint guides displayed.
Implemented Designs
Once implemented, users are able to edit and adjust the vertical alignments for roadways. The following images are of a proposed version of Mercer Street in South Lake Union in Seattle, WA.
Shown is South Lake Union shown here in this model of Seattle.
When we take a look at the vertical alignment by selecting on the road and rotating the view to a more profile-esque view we are able to see the vertical alignment grips and the vertical alignment geometry. If we wanted to take a closer look at a PVI in the profile view, I created a mirrored interaction where the user can click on either the PVI in-world or in profile and get a closer more in-depth view of that point.
Here we see the PVI selected and highlighted in both the profile and in-world.
If the road designer wanted to edit the location or properties of the curve, they could either do it in-world in context of the environment, or they can use the profile view to get a more accurate position.
Here we see the user adjusting the elevation of a PVI while maintaining the station for that PVI. When a user edits a PVI either in profile or in-world, both update dynamically to provide the user with as much imformation possible.
