For our latest employee spotlight, we sat down with Aaron Lawson, UrbanTide's newest frontend developer who's spearheading the complete rebuild of our uSmart data insights platform.

With a background in interactive mapping and AI-powered applications for the energy sector, Aaron brings valuable experience in transforming complex datasets into actionable insights for organisations tackling environmental and social challenges.

Aside from sharing an insight into his journey towords purpose-driven development, Aaron also reveals what users can expect from UrbanTide's uSmart 2.0 upgrade—including major UX improvements, enhanced performance, and an exciting new in-house mapping solution on the horizon.

What drew you to UrbanTide, and how does this new role align with your passion for using data and AI for positive impact?

UrbanTide caught my attention for a few reasons. Firstly, the company uses all of my favourite frameworks and tools for building the app, so as a developer that was really appealing. But so was the opportunity to build software that tackles environmental and social issues. It's a great motivator and gives me some extra purpose knowing that I'm contributing in some way too.

You're leading the development of an upgrade to the uSmart platform. What can users of the platform expect from the upgrade ? 

Users can expect a complete refresh of the platform's look and feel. We’ve made some major UX upgrades and uSmart 2.0 will be easier for less experienced users to work with. We’ve essentially rebuilt the platform from the ground up, on newer technology, which will have a big impact on performance.

The new update also gives organisations more granular control of how they manage and share their data. Finally, we have some big plans for an in-house mapping solution which users can collate, visualise and evaluate all their spatial data on a map all within the platform. 

Users can use this self-serve mapping feature to spin up quick dashboards or insights to visually interpret their data. This feature is still in early development, but will be rolled out later in the year.

Can you tell us about your background in interactive mapping and how it applies to the challenges currently facing energy, housing and transport organisations?

I was first introduced to development of mapping applications during my 3rd year at university, while on a summer placement at a housebuilder who wanted to visualise all their sites' plot data, location data and lots of other information they had readily available. It was a really interesting solo project where I had the freedom to build and experiment with different frontend technologies.

In 2022, I joined an Edinburgh-based startup early-on, who are building a GIS platform to automate route planning and optimisation for companies in the energy sector. This allowed clients to plan routes for onshore and offshore wind farms, plot sites for new substations and evaluate millions of different combinations of metrics against RAG thresholds, biodiversity net gain impact, and more. The selling point was accelerating the planning process from 12 months to just 6 weeks. 

Having joined early as one of the few frontend developers, I watched the team and product grow over the following 3 years as the platform gradually became much more powerful for users, with plenty of new features and evaluation tools along the way.

You've previously developed AI-powered platforms focused on social good. How do you see data visualisation and mapping playing a role in helping public sector organisations achieve their sustainability goals? 

I see data visualisation is an excellent tool for converting complex data into actionable insights. There are many different types of ways to show data and geospatial data that will instantly grab the user's attention. Visualisations help tell a story. From simple charts and scatter plots all the way to spatial heatmaps, clusters, use of 3D maps or even timeline animated maps.

I think it's really important the public sector uses mapping as it's the most effective way to engage with stakeholders, including citizens or residents, to convey their sustainability goals.

Public sector organisations often have users with varying levels of technical expertise. How do you design interfaces that work for both data scientists and policy makers?

While data scientists and policy makers can vary in levels of experience, uSmart 2.0 has been specifically designed to support both.

You don't want a the less experienced user-base to be alienated by features they'll never need to use, so we take a progressive disclosure approach where the default interface is clean with clearly visible call-to-action items. Advanced features for power users can be hidden behind expandable sections so they're not the primary focus of each UI flow.

We support different roles within organisations in the app, and this also gives us the power to conditionally render only the features a less experienced user may need in order to use the app instead of showing too many at once.

We also make use of tooltips throughout the software, where users can find out more information about features by hovering over them and additional context or explanations are presented. This prevents too much jargon on the UI by default.

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