PEEPPS

Project & Part Management

Challenge.

Tinker Air Force Base came to Anautics as part of the Greenhouse Contract to get help with designing, building, and iterating a project management tool for their engineers in the Propulsion division. They needed help managing projects and parts in one tool for unity. We wanted to focus on human centered design and spent weeks on site with actual users of the tool.

Goal.

Steve wants to create a project for his team and plane. He needs a place to leave notes, upload attachments, link other projects, add guests with limited access, and track activity. He also needs to a way to track the parts that are related to this project.

Elegantly Designed And Functional PM Tool With Air Force Identity

Metric.

Successfuly onboard all members of Tinker AFB engineers to a new tool that will help them track both projects and parts and have a place of unity. Import thousands of old projects and add new ones to scale.

Process.

Observe → Reflect → Make

To drive meaningful outcomes for our users, we first wanted gain a deep understanding of the challenges they faced. By constantly immersing ourselves in the worlds of these users, we ensured that our solutions would meet their needs. We had received a basic requirements doc from the base but we wanted to explore much more and help them solve their real problems. We would spend time going through an idea phase and building user stories. It would also help to whiteboard flows out with the Product Owners to bridge gaps of UX flows.

After several weeks spending on-site at the base, we came together to reflect on our observations to help us synthesize and analyze findings, building a more nuanced understanding of our users across the team. We built out personas based on users and their permissions from their CAC card access. We found people wanted a tool they could trust. One that was clean, easy to use, fast on government networks. We eventually took this much further and worked in a lot of user delights such as: light and dark mode based on PC preferences, skeleton loading screens, animated upload, admin and profile management.

The only way to see an outcome is to make one—even if the idea wasn’t fully baked yet. We knew we were scratching the surface of what was possible with Air Force legacy software.

Rapid, low-fidelity prototyping allowed us to simulate ideas and test hypotheses quickly and cheaply. We would design and test with Tinker on a weekly basis to get the proper feedback. After low-fidelity protoytyping and approval process we moved on to using high fidelity mockups with Figma. We would meet weekly with Product Owners to ensure the design made sense and compared to other market tools (Dropbox, Microsoft, Asana, Jira, etc). We would also leverage tools such as Webflow to help show the design in action without leveraging developer resources.

Once we moved into beta and started on-boarding users, we leveraged tools like Hotjar and Fullstory to see how people were using this tool. It helped us to keep iterating and shipping to production and gaining trust with these users.