Lookin' Stellar

Introducing Hologram’s new Stellar Design System

Since day one, the Hologram team has been focused on simplifying cellular service for IoT devices. Today, I’m really excited to show you the next version of Hologram Dashboard which makes it even easier to manage a connected fleet. As part of these updates, we’re launching our design system, which we’ve named Stellar.

Starting with the Platform

Design isn’t just the interface you see in our Dashboard but extends throughout the entire experience with Hologram. Over the past year, we’ve been hard at work making it easier than ever to launch a cellular IoT product:

• Simplified coverage and billing so it’s one price across 196 countries
• Automatic carrier switching with multiple local carriers in each country for redundant coverage
• A single SIM card that can be upgraded as our network improves, as we did with the launch of CAT-M service in the United States
• Ability to get started instantly, with no contracts, fees, or legal loopholes
• Preflight workflow tools to make scaling up your deployment stress-free

Now we’re excited to turn our attention back to the Hologram Dashboard interface. This week we launched new tools for your IoT deployments as well as a whole new look and feel. Here’s some insight into how we made these decisions and how we think it will make building and managing your fleet even easier.

Designed for Your Whole Team

We’ve spent this past year talking with our customers — building an even better understanding of how IoT projects work from idea to pilot to launch to scale. The biggest thing we’ve learned is how much of a team effort every project is. From engineering and business teams to product and supply chain, there are many departments, functions, and people involved in every connected product.

From this, we centered the new Hologram Dashboard around capabilities not just for your engineers, but also your operations, support, finance, and business teammates.

For operations teams, our new Preflight technology automates your deployment workflows. Allowing for live data testing on the ground at your manufacturer — even if they’re on the other side of the globe—makes building an IoT product significantly easier. When your product arrives at its final destination, Preflight will automatically activate the SIM with the correct data plan and custom parameters.

For finance and accounting managers, we have new detailed usage reporting and billing areas. You can easily find devices that aren’t behaving normally and then investigate further with our new data exporting tools.

New Visual Design

This Dashboard launch represents the biggest shift in the Dashboard design since its original release. From buttons to typography to date pickers, we’ve refined and refreshed the core of our design system.

screenshot of Stellar dashboardscreenshot of Stellar dashboardscreenshot of Stellar dashboardscreenshot of Stellar dashboard

The Stellar Design System also represents a tighter integration between the design and engineering teams. This alignment and collaborative work have allowed us to craft the best possible experience for our users while building reusable components that make expanding Hologram’s product vision easier.

Stellar Patterns

With our newly designed building blocks, we’ve started to introduce radically improved design patterns and flows throughout the Dashboard.

Consistent Reporting Flows

Whether you’re determining how much data was used by a particular device or reporting on your monthly spend across all devices, each reporting flow mirrors each other. This consistency lowers the barriers of entry for new team members and lowers the learning curve when using your Dashboard.

screenshot of Hologram dashboard

A Jumping off Point

Your Hologram Dashboard has been designed to make it easy to dig into how your devices operate on the platform. You can “double click” into a subset using our Inspect tool. This distraction-free environment provides a space to review individual devices or export data to further investigate in your team’s business intelligence tools.

Data Panels

We’ve condensed the way information is bundled and surfaced to your team. These panels represent distinct points of data and provide a consistent way to review information between individual devices, subsets of your deployments, or across your entire fleet.

What’s in a Name

We’ve always had a soft spot for space themes in product naming. Our 4G LTE radio is called the Nova (/products/nova) and our secure tunneling service is called Spacebridge (/guides/secure-tunneling-with-spacebridge). But more than that, we wanted our new dashboard to represent a visually striking and significantly elevated experience than anything the cellular IoT world had seen before.

So, here’s to Stellar.

Stage 1 Complete

This release is just the start for the Stellar Design System. I’m looking forward to talking to more and more of our customers about how they use their Dashboard and gather feedback on what we could do to improve their experience. If you have feedback on the new dashboard, reach out to the design team directly by emailing design@hologram.io (mailto:design@hologram.io).

For more updates and a behind the scenes look at our process, follow the Hologram design team on Dribbble (https://dribbble.com/hologramio).