Concept
Research
Interactions
Visuals
December 2020 - June 2021
Team Artemis Industry is a sect within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoU) that is working with Raytheon Space and Intelligence. Team Artemis wanted to modernize their online training, which consisted of a large variety of deliveries, and in addition to modernizing this content, they wanted a central hub/launcher to tie it altogether and make it easy for their users to access the content for each course.
Make an easily navigated modern UI
Must be "fun, flashy and exciting" but still works on the internal network
Links to all the different courses for each segment and its content within
Age: 23
Occupation: Engineer Intern
Seesha is a recent engineering graduate who has always been fascinated by the stars and it's always been her dream to work in the field of space exploration. As a recently hired Raytheon Intelligence and Space intern, she would love a place to watch more specifics on the workings of space and satellites and advance her education.
Age: 48
Occupation: Satellite Architect
Bob has been an engineer all of his life and has worked his way up, eventually becoming a Satellite Architect. However, with Bobs busy schedule, he needs an easier way to pull up training and materials as reference for himself and when he is mentoring new hires.
The exact quote that the stakeholders gave me for what they wanted to see with the launcher was "fun, flashy and exciting." They wanted a UI that would house all of the content to be just as exciting as the content itself. To solve that, the designs I drew out all were created with the intention of using animation throughout.
Due to the fact that we already had all of the course content developed and we were nearing the end of development for the entirety of the project, the stakeholders were more interested in seeing a finished product that used all of the assets we already had rather than mock-ups or a Lo-Fi Prototype. It was decided that since we were using a program called Storyline for the UI, if there were any major changes to flow or design, it wouldn't take long to implement these changes.
I conducted two usability studies for the project. The first consisted of three of the stakeholders delivering feedback on completing the task of opening one of the training materials within the Hi-Fi Prototype. A second usability study was conducted with the updates from the findings implemented but there were no further findings or insights.
Greeted with only a badge on the landing page, it was decided to add some direction text to make the experience more intuitive.
Worried about browser functionality for certain demographics, the stakeholders wanted to add a note on the course pages that let the user know that how the file opened would be dependent on their browser settings.
The stakeholders wanted to add a credits page to show the team responsible for developing all the content.
The stakeholders wanted to see progress was being made while using the launcher.
The main challenge of this project was to make sure the UI had a modern feel while making sure that it was easy to navigate. Keeping the navigation simple by only having well spelled out links available to the user made it feel streamlined.
It was also pointed out during the first usability study that making sure the user knows what to do when the landing page loads and showing progress on what has already been viewed in the course also helped with making the experience intuitive.
From the very beginning, the stakeholders knew that they wanted this launcher to be "fun, flashy and exciting." This was accomplished by keeping simple animations in mind from the very beginning of development. We originally wanted to include a video montage on the main table of contents page as well, but due to limitations with the internal network where these files would be stored, this wasn't an option.
Within every course page there would be three links that all branch out to the various items available for that course. These were following our rule of keeping the navigation simple, so the user knew what they were clicking on.
The Artemis project as a whole was one of the largest and most satisfying projects I've worked on.
I thought that I was a good multi-tasker and team/project leader before this project but working with all the moving parts for Artemis while leading a large design team and working with other departments really showed me what I am capable of in regard to managing a project of a larger scale.
As far as the UX/UI side of things is concerned, this also taught me that sometimes every part of a process isn't necessary to create a quality product. For this project, we skipped doing digital wireframes and jumped right to the Hi-Fi Prototype, which is unusual. While I am normally not a fan of skipping parts in a process because that can lead to other issues, there are cases where it's not always necessary to do each part of you or the stakeholder already has a good idea of where to take it.