Strategic Product Suite Research

Driving Accelerated Product Delivery for Warfighters

Lead UX Design Researcher | U.S. Air Force | Jan 2025 - May 2025

Note: This case study has been sanitized to remove sensitive information, with select details and images blurred, redacted or recreated in accordance with security requirements.

Mission🎯

Enable joint forces to seamlessly request and fulfill air support at scale. Modernize workflows and integrations so requests are automated, consistent, and fully integrated into the Air Tasking process.

Scope: Portfolio-wide research to inform product strategy, scope, and scale. Explore how the suite can support pre-planned support requests, mapping features, data, and integration pathways across applications.

Challenge

Multiple data sources with inconsistent formats
Outdated integration patterns → frequent failures & manual workarounds
Limited time for modernization before capability delivery deadline
“Throw-away” work risk since upstream modernization was pending
Difficulty accessing external users for validation

Approach

Conducted 20+ interviews with operators, stakeholders, and domain experts
Reviewed doctrine, past research, and legacy artifacts
Mapped domain spaces, workflows, and data flows to existing architecture
Worked with engineering on conceptual integration patterns
Partnered with design to produce workflow concepts & UI mockups for request intake, tracking, and fulfillment

Impact

Delivered research insights + workflow concepts to guide integration strategy
Defined request sources, holding pen concepts, and status notifications
Proposed UI patterns for pre-filled tasking to reduce manual data entry
Enabled product + engineering teams to begin work on support request integration capability
Informed product roadmap with strategic portfolio-level insights

Reflection

Wins: Built clear picture of integration challenges, uncovered hidden data flow issues, and provided actionable workflows for delivery.

Challenges: Heavy technical dependencies, reliance on outdated integration patterns, speculative or conflicting opinions on approach.

Next Time: Escalate earlier to architecture/engineering for a technical research assessment, since much of the problem space was integration-driven rather than user-driven.

Learn More

Diving into the details....

Strategic Product Suite Research

Outcome

Deliver research artifacts that inform the scope and scale of what is necessary to support air support request within the existing Air Tasking interface and any integration needs
Deliver a workflow and concept designs that dictates request fulfillment and data flow in the existing air tasking tool interface
Define request sources and necessary integration pathways

Scope

Portfolio-wide research to inform product strategy, scope, and scale. Explore how the suite can support pre-planned support requests, mapping features, data, and integration pathways across applications.

Agency & Users

Air Tasking for U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command

Duration

January 2025 – May 2025

Research Team

1 Lead UX Researcher
1 Lead Product Manager
2 Lead Architecture Engineers

My Role: Lead UX Researcher

Mission & Challenges

Operational Problem

Joint forces require a seamless way to submit air support requests while Air Operations must be able to efficiently task and fulfill those requests at scale. However, the current software suite lacks the automation and modern integrations needed to support this workflow, forcing manual processing that slows execution and introduces data inconsistencies. To meet mission demands, the suite must modernize existing integrations, reduce manual management, and enable automated request handling that at minimum matches legacy capabilities while scaling for future operational requirements.

Why it mattered

Achieving parity with the legacy tool was critical to ensure the suite could provide an integrated air support request capability. Without it, warfighters would be unable to seamlessly fulfill Joint requests at scale, directly impacting mission success.

Success Criteria

Translate research insights into existing architecture and data flows
Provide conceptual integration and design strategies for the product suite
Define domain context, including scope, scale, and anticipated challenges
Enable the product team to use validated workflows and concepts to deliver the capability into production

Constraints

Deliver insights quickly enough to support capability deployment by year’s end
Work within integration and architectural limitations given tight timelines
Prioritize leveraging existing architecture before considering new solutions
Relying on upstream modernization is not feasible within the project window
Research conducted within a classified domain and context

Discovery Research

Approach

Uncovering Workflows and Mapping Integration Opportunities

Our research began with a deep dive into both operational legacy systems and past product efforts to understand the context surrounding air support requests. We conducted interviews with domain experts, end users, and stakeholders to validate current process flows, surface hidden capabilities, and learn how requests were managed within operations centers. Desk research complemented these sessions, drawing on doctrine, user manuals, and previous research artifacts to build a solid foundation. To better understand the technical landscape, we mapped domain spaces and data flows against existing architecture, collaborated with engineering on a tentative integration strategy, and worked with design to create mockups aligned with current interface capabilities. We also developed and tested tentative workflow patterns covering request intake, tasking, and fulfillment. Using comparative analysis, service maps, and process mapping, we explored where workflows could be streamlined and where UI adjustments could better support request management. These insights laid the groundwork for framing the problem and defining how a modernized capability could scale effectively while remaining aligned with user needs and system constraints.

Insights

Challenges

The original integration model wasn’t a complete copy paste IE wouldn’t work for all route sources of data
The current integration broke a lot forcing manual communication to validate request receipt and feedback
A one size fits all approach was possible but would require a technical deep dive outside the scope of design
Redundancies existed in terms of data sources. IE the same data was coming from two different sources.
Parts of the data were being documented in other locations before reaching the user or receiver which would need to be accounted for during the modernization effort
This was a data integration technical problem to be solved and less of a design problem
Another tool was being adopted temporarily which provided some capability but was lacking a feedback loop and proper data documentation
Providing a status or feedback loop to requesters would reduce manual comms
Manually receiving updates to the data will not be sustainable
More real time data & display up
The application will need to integrate or share data with applications outside of the suite

Data was coming from multiple sources and systems in different formats
The integration pattern was old and outdated but there wasn’t time to build out a more modern approach initially
Upstream sources were looking to modernize their systems in the not so distant future so the solution would eventually be throw away work.
Lots of different opinions on how to approach the integration
Availability and responsiveness for external interviews was limited

Problem Framing

Problem Statement

Joint forces and Air Operations lacked modern tooling to submit, task, and fulfill air support requests at scale. The current suite relied on manual processes and outdated integrations, creating delays, data inconsistencies, and limiting the ability to meet mission demand.

– “Outdated tools forced manual processing of air support requests, slowing execution and limiting scalability.”–

Core Jobs To Be Done Use Cases

Primary User

Receive external support request through data integration
Fulfill request by tasking missions and plans for approval

Design Objectives

Introduce a notification for request received, in progress & fulfilled/tasked
Introduce a holding pen for request received
Introduce the concept of converting a request to fulfilled once tasked
Handoff all insights workflows and concepts to the product team
Workflow must demonstrate how request data is received via integration and the users approach to fulfilling sed request
Handoff design concepts to the product team designers
Introduce filters to reduce clutter to the viewing space
Introduce request data form fields that can be help support a prefilled task to reduce manual hand jamming of data
Utilize the current design system and known interactions Update the UI to match the current design system and trends

Strategy & Exploration

Research Artifacts

Outdated tools forced manual processing of air support requests, slowing execution and limiting scalability. Through user research, I mapped how requests were received and fulfilled, then introduced concepts like status notifications, a holding pen for new requests, and prefilled task forms to cut down on manual entry. These workflows and insights were handed off to product managers and designers, providing a clear path to modernize the system within the current design framework and accelerate mission support.

UX Research Contribution &

Collaboration

UX Research

Served as sole UX Researcher and initial UI designer, owning early discovery and concept design.
Defined and delivered initial workflows, wireframes, and design concepts that shaped product direction.
Generated actionable insights from research and proposed design recommendations to guide product strategy.
Led and facilitated 20+ internal and external user interviews, synthesizing findings into clear themes.
Presented insights and design rationale to stakeholders, leadership, and the product team to drive alignment.

Collaboration

Partnered with leadership and stakeholders to define scope and iteratively rescope based on research findings.
Collaborated with the product lead to align user needs with business priorities and roadmap decisions.
Worked closely with the engineering lead to inform architecture choices and integration planning.

Conceptual Designs

Conceptual wireframes explored future-state capabilities, including proactive status alerting, request triage workspaces, and pre-populated task flows to reduce cognitive load and manual effort.

Reflections

Outcomes &

Reflection

What worked

Uncovered critical insights about the data flow architecture and system limitations that were previously unknown.
Provided the team with the foundation to deliver a complete support request integration capability.
Built a clear, shared understanding of the current state of the request ecosystem.
Delivered strategic insights that directly informed and accelerated product line delivery.

Challenges

Limited access to external users, making validation more difficult.
Abundance of speculation and conflicting information around the best integration strategy.
Difficulty securing support for short-term or disposable work.
No ability to wait for external modernization efforts before proceeding.
Some research areas had to be handed off to engineering for technical spikes, as they were out of scope for design.
Many challenges were technical architecture problems, not traditional user research ones.
Constraints of an outdated integration approach with no time for modernization upfront.

What we would do different

Involve the architecture team earlier and scope the work as a technical research assessment, given the nature of the challenges.
Clarify early that much of the work would be re-validating knowns and strategizing integration approaches, rather than pure user research.
Establish a process to surface technical questions upfront, ensuring the right expertise is aligned from the beginning.

Leadership Insight

Clear scoping is critical. This project showed that distinguishing between design research and technical architecture challenges early on enables the right teams to lead, reduces wasted effort, and accelerates delivery.