NextGen Mission Planning
Overview
The Air Force and Navy overlap with various goals and data for aircraft mission planning. Rather than working as individual groups creating different planning components and to increase collaboration, the Air Force and Navy joined forces as an enterprise to create a cohesive solution. NextGen aims to increase resource and design reuse. The project applies the SAFe and the enterprise contains 400+ members. I am a UI/UX designer that supports the project as an embedded designer and user researcher. As a a member of the LUXCE team, I work with multiple user researchers and UI/UX designers that are spread across various companies and support different levels of the enterprise. We work to create and apply a design system for the product.
Disclaimer: This is a government project, so only limited information is allowed to be displayed and discussed.
Process
Embedded Designer
As an embedded designer, I work with new Capabilities/Features and transitioning legacy planning components to the NextGen project. The goal here is to not reinvent the wheel, but to understand the users, their workflow and their strain points, to create a NextGen product that improves seamlessly supports their planning process.
Research
Review the capability/feature, legacy UIs, ICDs, any other information available.
Collaborate with the owner on their intention of the feature and ask questions.
Conduct initial user research to understand user workflow and what pieces/fields of legacy are important to them.
Ideate
Brainstorm ideas for UIs and workflow applying sketch methodology, but within in Adobe XD.
Design/Prototype
Create mock ups/wireframes using Adobe XD ensuring alignment with NextGen Design System.
Evaluate
Review and collaborate with multiple designers (including design critique), users, Program Managers (PM) and developer.
Iterate
Continual communication and collaboration with LUXCE team members, users, PMs and developers.
User Researcher
As a user researcher, I have supported multiple user events and user feedback sessions. These range from individual user feedback sessions moderating a scenario to observing enhanced development tests (EDT).
Plan
Support planning of event proposing tasks to address in scenarios.
Analyze
Conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis of data.
Utilize excel to help sift through quantitative data.
Conducted qualitative analysis such as System Usability Scale (SUS) score analysis.
Conduct User Research
Act as moderator, note taker, and sometimes both for usability tests, observational research, focus group and A/B testing.
Produce Recommendations
Create recommendations based off of patterns of UI issues determined from analysis for leadership on future work.
