As part of the team as a UX Designer, I help our customers to easily create training plans, manage personnel, and document progress all in one centralized hub. We have conducted extensive research and cross-analysis on the Navy Force to understand our users' experience, in addition to actively going through multiple ideations of our prototype to create positive, effective solutions.
The Air force lacks an all-around platform that organizes different tasks and information utilized by different units. There isn't a system that can complete, real-time transparency into task completion. As a team we wanted to develop a tool that eliminated tedious data management so AF leaders can perform their true job functions and cultivate mission-readiness within their unit.
The current system has the "My Teams" section as the first page that appears when you log in into the software. This was designed to act as an overall summary page that gives supervisors direct access to the status of their team members without much effort, targeting efficiency.
This functionality provides the team's task status by looking at individual completion. Clicking on each individual shows the tasks that needs to be completed or was already completed. This helps Training Managers keep track of each team member and have the ability to keep everyone accountable.
EZTrain has implemented a direct route to send SMS to Trainees to remind them of upcoming or immediate tasks necessary for training. Supervisors can send out action lists to trainees' phones and they have the ability to respond directly through their phones, automatically updating the website and notifying the appropriate supervisor.
There are different ways to communicate to the trainees such as sending a verification text, action reminder or custom message. All of these methods are intended for supervisors to have constant communication with the ability to allow for mass messaging lifting the burden off of supervisors to do it manually.
Get access to all the completed tasks from your team all in one area for easy access. In addition, you have the ability to generate a report of the completed task for reference and data analysis.
The live updates that are integrated within the SMS system are aggregated into a finished task log where supervisors can have a clear paper trail of task completion and can send the results to training managers or superiors. These accessible action lists eliminate any confusion and ensure that trainees arrive on base already knowing exactly what tasks they complete and when.
We decided to directly go to the Air Force and interview 3 main groups of people. These 3 groups were decided based on who this tool would be primarily be used by and benefited by. We wanted to get as much insight on what differences they wanted to see from their current management system.
EZTrain was offered DoD funded research under an STTR Grants in partnership with the air Force to continue our research and development. As a result we were able to test the product in live training environments for over 200+ end-users. expanded testing to 4 Air Force bases and one Army National Guard Unit and presented our software to the Chair of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley.
EZTrain team members taught supervisors how to use our software; supervisors then fully relied on the platform for a training session taking place during the weekends. Four supervisors and 222 airmen piloted the program.
As a team, as we already had in mind what problem we wanted to target when researching the Air Force. Within the ideation process, we wanted to highlight the user's voice by pin-pointing the main issues they had trouble with when using their existing data management tool. We narrowed our scope so we could create direct solutions to specific problems we agreed was the main focus of our project:
We took all the main points from our research and interviews and organized our ideas by affinity mapping. From this, we saw a clear picture on specific patterns these user groups had difficulty with and discussed possible solutions we can implement.
From our research, having a specific area that organized and summarized data point was essential in building a better data management system for users.
As a result, we determined that creating a smart dashboard that delivers actionable insights on training progress and current data was necessary to improve the current dashboard. We wanted to create a solution that leverages proprietary algorithms to prepare, execute, and document readiness management more efficiently.
How might we create a solution that leverages proprietary algorithms to prepare, execute, and document readiness management more efficiently?
We began by creating low-fidelity wireframes based on the research we conducted. We wanted to create simple wireframes just to get our ideas and see how we can expand our ideas to actual designs.
This the Smart Dashboard's preliminary designs where we provide access for users to have access to all of the necessary data points needed to track trainers status.
To address having direct easy access to immediate results, we added 4 different widgets that represent quick progress checks for different metrics within each team.
We are still deciding on the data but we found that it was efficient and useful to be able to see a progress check within a year's span in addition to over group training metrics. This helped solved the issue of efficiency within data management and easy access.
Please go to: https://www.goeztrain.com/ for the ongoing product.
Another tab that we created was a team overview. This goes more into detail about the specific data within each member of the team in contrast to the data presented in the Smart Dashboard.
There is a functionality that predicts which trainees are most to least likely to fall behind, allowing for us to target our goal in creating more accountability amongst the Air Force.
We thought adding an area where tasks where organized by category allowed for a more personalized and organizational workspace.
As this dashboard is primarily for task and data management, we wanted to create a space for easy access and where they can locate specific tasks easier by just going to the designated area.
Our primary goal when thinking about these functionalities was how to create an easy accessible and approachable way for the Air Force to track all their information given the amount of data they need to store.
While this project is still ongoing and there are a lot of new ideas that we are trying to implement. Through the challenges and fun design processes, I learned a lot about being in a cross-disciplinary team and how I can best implement my designs.
Especially coming from a cross-functional team where everyone has different skillsets, I learned a lot about the importance of learning from my teammates. When we came to developing our prototypes and ideas into designs, we came into problems of taking into consideration data outside of just design methodologies but also the data that was obtained on the marketing side. If we missed intersecting those research data into our designs, we wouldn't have targeted the user audience as effectively as we wanted.
This is one of the longest projects I have participated on. With such passionate people, I learned a lot from their ideas but also how things take time. There were a lot of times where we weren't able to get immediate results because our ideas needed to be communicated to different teams such as the engineering and marketing. As our team is still very small, we prioritized insight from everyone, and that took time.
Thank You to my wonderful team!