EON was born from university research — a powerful handheld LiDAR scanner designed for geotechs and surveyors. Rockmass asked us to take its engineer-built interface and redesign it for the chaos of real mine conditions. We created a system that’s intuitive, glove-friendly, and built for quick, confident use in the dark.
Working hundreds of meters underground means zero margin for confusion. We designed the interface around human factors — thick gloves, low visibility, high stress — ensuring critical actions were effortless. The result: a streamlined, low-friction UI that keeps users focused on safety and accuracy, not software. When we first saw the EON interface, it was pure engineering. Powerful, but unclear. Which is dangerous inside a mine. Built by brilliant minds who understood the situation, and the tech, but not how to make it easy. We didn’t redesign it for aesthetics; we redesigned it for survival. Every detail, from typography size, touch zones, to colour contrast was engineered for visibility and reach. We stripped the interface to its essentials, then rebuilt it around ergonomics and empathy. No unnecessary choices. No distractions. It had to be fast, glove-friendly, and dead simple. The result was an interface that operators could trust instinctively, even when the ground shook.
EON came to us as a brilliant but hard to use platform. A tool born in research labs, not mine shafts. The software worked outstandingly well, but only if you had the patience of an engineer and the dexterity of a pianist. Underground, that can be a death sentence. We had to turn that raw capability into something field-ready, something that worked when the lights were dim, the air was dusty, and every mistake carried cost.
How do you build a touch interface for miners wearing gloves, surrounded by vibration and echo? How do you communicate complex scanning feedback when a user can only glance at the screen for a second? Solving those questions meant rethinking every assumption about human-computer interaction — starting from the rock face out.
Working during lockdown, we conducted fully virtual contextual studies with miners and engineers. We mapped usage flows, identified high-risk moments, and defined heuristics for clarity and minimal interaction time.
Contextual research with geotechs and stakeholders
Task and flow mapping & prioritization
Heuristic evaluation
Risk-based UX prioritization
We built interactive prototypes with oversized touch zones always within reach, adaptive contrast, and dark-mode themes optimized for headlamps. Testing validated that even with gloves, users could capture, review, and save scans without error.
Wireframes
Interactive Prototypes
User testing
Low-light prototype testing
Glove-use interaction tests
Contrast and font optimization
Iterative user feedback loops
We finalized a clean, minimal interface with simplified states, clear error recovery, and direct pathways for capture and export. EON became a reliable tool for real work underground, not a science experiment.
Final UI system design
Component library creation
Interaction specs for developers
QA collaboration on embedded implementation
EON’s redesigned interface empowers miners to scan quickly and accurately in the harshest conditions. The dark UI, clear hierarchies, and glove-friendly interactions reduce mental load and error risk — turning a technical challenge into an intuitive tool that just works.
The redesign transformed EON from a prototype into a trusted field tool used across active mine sites. Rockmass gained a reputation for usability and dependability, strengthening their brand and setting the stage for the later Stratus platform. EON proved that thoughtful design can make even extreme environments feel effortless.
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