Mahitha Grandhi

INTRO

T&R Builder is a new tool that will be added to the existing M-SHARP software, it can create/edit/publish a draft/version T&R manual. This Training and Readiness (T&R) Manual establishes training standards, regulations, and policies regarding the training of Marines in the required fields.

DESIGN PROCESS

We followed an iterative process of planning, designing, developing and testing to build our product. We divided the complex product(T&R Builder tool) into smaller features to simplify our process and workflow.

“Being the sole designer, I got the opportunity to get involved in the whole product life cycle.”

Planning and Requirement Analysis

We started our process by planning the broken small features of the complex product. The Product Owners take charge by briefing out the user requirements and business goal to the team members (developers, designer, scrum master, QA engineer, program manager).

Our business goal is “Customer Satisfaction”

After our initial planning, we analyze the requirements and prioritize them according to the MoSCoW method:

• M - Must have this requirement to meet the user and business needs.
• S - Should have this requirement if possible, but project success does not rely on it.
• C - Could have this requirement if it does not affect anything else on the project.
• W - Would like to have this feature requirement but delivery won't be this time.

Once the requirements are prioritized, we dive deep into user context and empathize it. As both our product owners are marine veterans who have used and worked on the M-SHARP software for more than 10 years, they play a major role in advocating how the users think, feel and behave.

To understand more about the problem and user needs, I have attended a Training & Readiness (T&R) conference where I had the opportunity to practically observe how the Marine’s work on the manual, their workflow to baseline a manual and how standards are established. From these ethnographic observations, I have defined what can be improved.

Findings:

Design

Once we are done with all the “Why” questions in the analysis stage, now we are ready to find the “How” to solve the problem. Here in the Design stage, I follow a cyclic process of ideating, prototyping, testing and repeat | repeat | repeat. Iterative design helped us to improve usability and to understand the problem in the early stages.

"In an iterative design you can design it once but make it better as many times you need”

Ideate:

As we are ready with our user data in the Planning and Requirement Analysis Stage, I started to explore innovative solutions in this stage. I led the brainstorming sessions and prioritized ideas by breadth over depth as the main focus is getting a diverse range of ideas to prototype and test.

"Emphasis on quantity rather than quality during ideation.”

We are a small team of 4 (designer-me, product owners-2 and solutions architect-1; we call ourselves as Solution’s team 😄) so we generally refine and narrow down the ideas by discussing the pros and cons of it.

Rapid Prototyping

Now is the time to prototype the ideas which were narrowed down and to check their feasibility. Initially, I work on sketching all the possible ideas before I move on to designing the high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes. In this initial phase, I mainly care about the functionality, key feature to add in and the basic structure.

"A wireframe acts as a visual representation for designer’s ideas”

Design Testing

I test these low-fidelity wireframes with my product owners to collect feedback. I cross check whether the features I designed are aligning with the user requirements or not.

"In order to create the best experience for your user, you need to keep iterating & testing vigorously and I do follow this in my process”

High-fidelity wireframes - Once the low-fidelity wireframes are approved by the Product Owner, I design high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes using Adobe XD. From this point, I focus on the visuals and user flow of the software and finally demonstrate the designs to the developers and product owners for further feedback. In the next section, you can look at some of the key features that I've designed.

FEATURES