Elliott Hey
UX/Product Designer, Service Designer, User Researcher
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07402 840 161
motiveux.design@gmail.com
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Royal Air Force
Project: Air Defence System
Role: Lead UX Designer (Human Factors)
I was responsible for designing the new air defence system.
Background
The UK Air Defence system allows teams of RAF operators to police the UK’s airspace. Half of the team is responsible for the identification of all aircraft in the sky; the other half controls all RAF aircraft movements and interceptions.
The existing system was very expensive to maintain. It was conceived in the 1970s, designed in the 80s and built in the 90s. Therefore, it was already out of date when it went live. IBM were asked to modernise the system on to a windows platform using modern commercial-off-the-shelf technology to save maintenance costs.
I was the Lead UX Designer (called Human Factors in defence parlance) responsible for:
A team of UX specialists (between 2 and 13 depending on the phase of the project)
Designing the Human Machine Interface, comprising:
Operations room
Workstations
User interfaces
Designing and conducting:
Field studies (3 months)
Task, safety, workload and usability analysis and synthesis
Role and team design
User tests (4)
Managing the interlock between management, technical, safety, training, and third-party suppliers.
Approach
The project applied a Rapid Application Development approach (similar to Agile) over 2.5 years (I continued to go back for a week or two, every year for 10 years to see further improvements added). I worked closely with Developers, Testers, BAs, PMs, hardware, plus a range of SMEs to deliver this on time and to the satisfaction of the RAF.
One of the most important parts of this role was to perform user research. I was responsible for planning and conducting (with support from my team) ethnographic research with approximately 70 personnel over 3 months. They were observed in their natural work environment, in 3 different locations around the UK. The output of this exercise was a detailed task, workload and safety analysis across 25 different roles. This data was used to underpin the room design, jobs, training and UI.
One of the main challenges I faced desiging the user interface was managing the amount of visual information presented to operators. The more information the operator has, the more situational awareness they can obtain; however, if too much information is provided then this can overload the operators and degrade their performance.
User Interface design challenges
User Interface design challenges
25 different roles use the same user interface
Users perform 200 different tasks on the same user interface
Information is displayed in real-time (moving display)
98 different object types (e.g. aircraft, radars, airfields, ships) can be displayed:
Between 1 and 1,000s instances of each type
Potentially over 10,000 objects displayed at once
User Interface design activities
User Interface design activities
Surveyed each role to determine:
Which objects were required
When were they used (i.e. daily operations or war)
Which objects needed to be the most visually prominent
Were there any special circumstances (e.g. emergencies)
Facilitated UI design workshops:
6 Participatory design workshops with 20 personnel
12 workshops with different roles to assess how objects would be viewed together in context
User tested UI to demonstrate it was safe enough to use:
Multi-user user test
Full simulated exercise
6 UX observers for each test
72 RAF operators participated
$1million to design, run and complete
I established design principles to allow users to:
Control which types of objects and areas appear on the screen
Control the visual prominence of objects on the screen
Clearly distinguish each object, on their own and merged with other types
In order to clearly read textual information I designed a whole new font for this system. As you can see each pair of characters has been designed to be distinguishable from the other.
In order to quickly identify objects I added elements to make them stand out.
This is a snapshot of the geographical display presented to one of the operator roles. The user can amend the visual prominence of most objects, display and hide objects, and pull up labels on objects to find out more information.
Note that the colours displayed on this page are not truly representative of the actual colours seen by the operators.
Results
The project took 2.5 years to complete. The results were:
Training time reduced from 15 days to 2.5 days
Productivity of key operators up 100%
Various roles were no longer required
Won the MCA Management Awards 2007 for best Technology project
Received great feedback from the client:
“This successful implementation is a good example of honest relationships and close working with all parties involved from the early stages of setting requirements through to the acceptance of the equipment. This has led to a system that meets all users’ needs, is much simpler to operate and has been very enthusiastically received by the user community.”
Paddy Clayton, ACCS Team leader, MOD (UCMP)
Previous project: Nationwide Building Society
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