I was one of two designers on our team, and we were responsible for the entire redesign of Slapshot, the Air Force's Master Air Attack Planning Tool. The biggest challenge my team faced was getting stakeholder buy in to transform a mature, rigid application to meet our users’ needs. Using user research we justified our product direction with qualitative and quantitative data and achieved full stakeholder support in a full application rewrite.
Myself and another designer had just rolled onto the mature product team, Slapshot. Large deadlines loomed, our developers were being crushed by 2 years of technical debt, our users were struggling to use an app that was not meeting their needs, and stakeholders were breathing down our necks to produce something quickly.
Attempting to tackle a laundry list of requirements, we realized prerequisite refactoring work was needed. The prerequisite refactor took 5 months to complete, burning nearly half of our time to meet our deadline.
At this point our team stepped back and realized that something was very wrong. Design and Engineering ran some research and realized we had serious issues.
Note: All sensitive information has been removed from this case study and it has been approved for publication by the Kessel Run Security team.
The first goal of our research was to simply understand our user and their process. We knew there were major problems with the user workflow but needed to run the research to hone in on those specific issues. We knew there were major problems with the user workflow but needed to run the research to hone in on those specific issues.
As a team, we took 3 weeks to run an experiment. Design would run user research and work with engineering to define the data model for the user flow. The engineering team would build out a proof of concept app to demonstrate the promise of a new technical direction.
We found that the current process allowed for too much flexibility, leaving users confused about which step to take. It also allowed for many opportunities for user error and invalid data. We discovered two key insights that informed the ideation process.
My design pair and ideated on what this enhanced experience could look like. It needed to provide similar flexibility to the original process, while also adding in structure and improved data reliability. We focused first on defining what a "mission" would look like in Slapshot. Through user testing we discovered some usability issues, highlighted below, and iterated to the final version shown on the right.
Our proposed solution offered a more structured approach that still allowed "checkpoints" in which the user could leave the process and pick it back up later that would allow for the flexibility they needed while still maintaining data validity.
To validate our approach, we ran comparative usability testing to gather metrics on how users felt about the new solution compared to the existing app. Results were overwhelmingly positive towards our proposed solution.
At the same time, our developers were able to show a proof of concept version of their proposed architecture which aligned well with our proposed user flows. The team was excited to get moving on this transformation.
Spoiler alert, leadership was not on board, at least not at first.
With four months left to our major deadline, we approached leadership with the proposition of completely rewriting our app with a new architecture and UI. As one might expect there were major concerns:
"This isn't something we should do, this is something we have to do".
Col Lotspeich, Kessel Run Commander
Our team delivered 302 user stories in four months, doubling our previous 6 month velocity, and achieved all of the functional capability required before our deadline.
The new architecture allowed us to build the app in a way that aligned with the mental model of the user, ensured data validity, and prevented user error.
Not only did we receive kudos from every direction, our architecture team advised that the rest of the organization move to adopt the technical patterns we had implemented.
"[The Slapshot rewrite] was totally the right call. Not everbody saw that back in November...those of us that didn't are eating heaping helpings of humble time!"
Andrew Ross, Product Lead
