Turning a Two Year Military Planning Process Into a Two Hour One
Testimonials and Text Only Due to NDA.
Team: Designers, Engineers, Military SMEs Focus: UX Architecture & Research, Leadership
Designing Project Stormbreaker
I led the creative effort on Project Stormbreaker, a major congressionally funded military planning and simulation tool, since its inception in 2022. Stormbreaker is a highly ambitious tool that aims to completely encompass and digitize the US military’s complex and multi-year spanning process for planning operations, allowing even detailed plans to be constructed in only a matter of hours.
I started this project as a very distant contributor: Smartronix initially subcontracted creation of Stormbreaker to Microsoft, who subcontracted a portion of the UX work to me. Then, less than three months after Microsoft accepted this deal, I was made design lead on Stormbreaker managing five senior designers and working directly with Smartronix’s program director on a weekly basis (remotely and in Honolulu) to determine product vision and define requirements. After eight months on the project, Smartronix hired me directly.
Stormbreaker remained my focus through successful development of an MVP after one year, and an additional year of creative support.
My Contributions Included
Complete Design Delivery on Stormbreaker
- All seven steps of the military’s Joint Planning Process delivered in their entirety. If the US military does something to make plans, I helped design the UI to let them do it in Stormbreaker.
- Hundreds of base pages and their respective flows envisioned, researched, wireframed, iterated on, prototyped, thoroughly redlined, and supported post-launch.
- Design of highly custom pages – Map views for managing deployed forces, an org chart creator for determining command structure, a custom PowerPoint creator, a simulation management system, a document editor, a classification and access management system, and much more.
- A well constructed overall architecture that lets users navigate the massive tool with few clicks and immediate familiarity.
A Full Design System From Scratch
- Core brand colors and typography that brought a modern look – a glass of cold water in an industry famous for ancient looking software.
- Dozens of UI components constructed in Figma to be ultra customizable and intuitive for dev and design alike to use.
- Full WCAG 2.1 compliance – colors and components meticulously checked and double checked to ensure accessibility needs are being met in almost any context.
- Rules for responsive adaptation at any screen size.
- Thorough annotation and documentation on everything, paired with a good relationship with dev to erase gaps between what gets designed and what gets built.
Stepping Up to Stop Layoffs: Leadership and Product Vision
Stormbreaker began with a lot of uncertainty: Senior voices at Smartronix and Microsoft had difficulty finding shared understanding on even big-picture questions like what this app would really do and how users would move around it.
In hopes of better understanding customer and user needs, I read the entire JP 5-0, a public 350 page technical document detailing how the military plans operations. I won’t pretend to have understood 100% of it on my first reading but I was able to learn enough to discover what I suspected Smartronix wanted. I independently drafted a design in my “extra” time that hit the mark so well that the Smartronix program director requested my presence at most leadership meetings going forward.
Two months later, I was formally promoted to Design Lead and managed the team of senior designers and researchers that had been my colleagues. I led with a philosophy of love and empathy, working one on one with each team member to empower and help showcase their strengths. I was closely involved in every study run by our UX researcher and every new component crafted by our visual designer.
The result was improved work and happier colleagues, but I also fulfilled an objective that was more personal to me: I quelled conversation about letting the team go during the most unprecedented tech layoff in history. All the people working under me began to show results to Microsoft leadership once I was made lead. And all of them got to keep their jobs.