Case Study: User Experience Design Services for Classified Environments

Challenge/Scope

Our Intelligence Community customer needed Web User Experience (UX) Design services to support their web presence as part of the Experience Directorate’s mission to fundamentally change the user’s experience and connect customers to GEOINT content and online capabilities in a dynamic and easy to use online environment.

Approach/Solution

Highlight designed, built, tested, and implemented usable, searchable, and semantically significant web sites/applications for the agency while operating as a center of excellence and managing engagements with each ‘customer’ as part of an account. We operated in a trio of workstreams including Federal civilian employees, active-duty military, and contractors to provide UX research/computer-human interaction analysis, UX wireframing and design, and UX implementation. We used UX heuristics research to understand the current workflows and enhance the user experience. We revamped all web interfaces from legacy hard-coded HTML to HTML5, Bootstrap, and Angular JS. By rewriting the code to modern programming languages, we ensured that agency web apps are hardware agnostic and able to operate on multiple devices, such as tablets and mobile devices.

We used Agile development practices, iterating releases from an MVP to a fully realized product with release of “beta” software as an essential part of this process. We planned, coordinated, scheduled, and deployed new releases of website user interface code to transition to the production environment following testing. We developed scripts for automated deployment as well as scripting code for use within the AWS cloud. We develop APIs for common tools and data loading into AWS’ NoSQL (DynamoDB) database.

Highlight used system performance, interaction, and customer feedback data to ensure our fielded applications we operating effectively. We used input from customers and end users on the usability and suitability of existing sites and web tools to develop new requirements as well as validate suitability during user acceptance testing. We planned, coordinated, scheduled, and deployed new releases of website user interface code to transition to the operational environment, working with our customer to implement a CI/CD deployment scheme to deploy from local development environments into the .mil PaaS cloud using GitLab.mil and Jenkins.

Capabilities

• UX account management 
• UX research/computer-human interaction analysis 
• UI wireframing and design 
• UX implementation 
• Tier III Service Desk/Help Desk Support
• CI/CD Deployment

Results/Outcomes

Highlight provided web applications with improved user satisfaction with well-designed, user-friendly interfaces that are easy to navigate and provide a seamless user experience. We enhanced accessibility and increased user engagement encouraging users to spend more time exploring GEOINT content. We delivered visually appealing, modern, and professional website design that aligns with agency brand guidelines and enhances the organization’s overall brand perception.