The British Army
Digitised workflow management across multiple apps with integrations.

art of resource management

My Role

Product Designer

Team

Product Owner
Product Designer
4 Developers
3 Testers

Duration

8 months
(from design to development)
Disclaimer: Due to the nature of the project, I cannot show the actual screens on a publicly accessible website.

Problem

There are around 100,00 personnels in the Army. To find a person with specific set of requirements to perform a task takes a lot of time and paperwork.

An intuitive digital workflow was required to replace and reduce the amount of paperwork..

Process

Phase 1 - User Research

The start of a project is always exciting for me. There are so many unknowns and I try not to create a rigid design framework until the problem is understood really well and explored.

This way there is a lot more space for creative thinking and the entire design process flows depending on the project and the problem.

My starting point is always some form of user research. In this project as I had access to the end users, I conducted User Interviews and Field Studies to understand their current ways of working.
Key insights from this phase -
The process documentation has to pass through many organisations for approval. The maintenance of this paperwork is time consuming.
The margin for error is very slim as sometimes it is a matter of life and death
Many users interact with the documents in the end to end workflow across a suite of apps. The flow has to be intuitive and easy to navigate.

User flows and Personas

Various personas interact during the entire workflow as they weave through the different apps.The first step was to map out the personas based on user research above and understand their "Jobs To Be Done".
I created a couple of user flows. The first one was to visually map out the user requirements and their current way of doing. This was presented to the stakeholders and users. We now had a shared understanding of user pain points and goals.
I created aother set of user flows to brainstorm ideas for the solution based on stakeholder feedback sessions and internal workshops.

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This was one of the user flows created showing the various touchpoints across different apps.
1

phase 2 - Ideation

The client follows a strict organisational hierarchy. Each level have their own way of tackling the workflow.
One of the challenges in the project was to find a solution that fit the diverse requirements at different departments.

phase 3 -THE SOLUTION

Using all the research data points from the previous phase, and using behavioural models, a few solutions were designed. These ideas were iterated and a single solution was designed based on feedback from the Product Owner, the User focus groups  and developers.
Each Demand would be streamlined into different user flows or value streams to cater to different flavours of the same Demand framework.
A workflow was created to easily endorse and push the document forward to people at different levels.
A single point of entry for all Demands coming into the Army was created.
An intuitive way to nominate the right personnel based on the requirements and a way to choose the right candidate by the deciding person was created.

The hurdles between design and development....

So the research was done, problem defined and many solutions proposed.

My next task was to convince the Business Product Owners why the proposed solutions worked, and then more difficult was the task to engage the development team with the solutions and designs.

Here is an insight into that process.

Presenting the solution to the business

The solutions were laid out against different user journeys and personas.
The best logical solution was exaplined based on the behavioural psychology to validate my design decisions.

After a few iterations, the solution that was chosen stood out for its succinctness and usability fo rthe target users.

Presenting the solution to the DEV TEAM

Though this was the more difficult of the two, my strategy was to involve the team right from the begining of the design process.

I conducted many workshops with the team explaining the rationale behind every design decision.

There were many valuable ideas from the team and I think going forward this will be one of the learnings that I plan to implement in my future design projects.
This experience turned out to be very fulfilling at the same time helping to build a cohesive team.

THE UI

Primary Square buttons
Primary Action Buttons
Secondary Action Buttons
Disabled  Buttons
Tab 1
Tab 2
Heading - Segoe UI - 18px Bold
Heading - Segoe UI - 18px Bold
Sub Heading - Segoe UI - 16px
Sub Heading - Segoe UI - 16px
Body - Segoe UI - 12px Normal
Body - Segoe UI - 12px Normal
I went for a minimalistic style adopting a combination of neomorphism (transparent shadows to depict the real world objects) and a flat design style.
The style sheet for this project was created, which is now being expanded to a design system and rolled out to the other suite of apps.

Learnings and Takeaways

1
This was a complex problem and the solution took many many iterations. Getting stakeholder buy in was one of the toughest part of this process.
2
I learnt to present my design decisions with behavioural and psychological reasoning.
3
Our solution is such a huge hit that the wider Defense community have taken notice and want to adapt some of the solution.

Thank You

Thank you for staying with me through the case study. Please feel free to get in touch.