Our team embarked on a journey to fully revamp the existing database as well as implement new functionality to streamline day-to-day tasks for U.S. Army leadership. In this project, we rethink, redesign, and rebuild the existing platform. We then implement new processes that enable army leadership to efficiently work on daily tasks, and we rebrand this powerful product as Vanguard (See Vanguard Landing Page).
Understanding the intricacies of the existing platform was a massive undertaking. It hosts all types of data for companies under Applied SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research), an army research program that funds companies to produce technology for the U.S. Army at large. However, most of the data was irrelevant to the user, and the largest pain point from our clients was that the platform is simply too cluttered to retrieve any relevant information easily. Through this process, our team faced a multitude of turbulent pivots that ultimately resulted in pursuing this redesign using Microsoft’s Model Driven App.
Microsofts Model Driven App is quite rigid, so I was able to design a pixel perfect version of all its components and their respective variations in Figma. I would reuse these components to scaffold experiences together for the entire platform and rapidly iterate them upon receiving feedback for the entirety of the project. Developing this design system allowed for a clear illustration of our vision to clients along with a seamless transition of my designs to development.
Our team was tasked not only to enhance the experience, but to implement processes into the database that reflect their tasks within the entire SBIR program. After the process was captured, I created wireframes to visualize this experience and test it before handing them off to development. This is a process that has been taking place over the past year, and the Vanguard database has been slowly transforming into a streamlined machine.
However, this process is rendered obsolete if the database does not adapt to withstand it. This inspired the complete restructuring of the user flow. The page navigation, sub-page navigation, individual pages, table views, input fields, and even the placeholder text for those input fields were stripped to only the most vital information and tweaked to eliminate redundancies and enhance clarity. I then redesigned a 1:1 replica of the entire database on Figma, with these new ideas in mind, and prototyped the flow.
This has been an extraordinary opportunity with incredible challenges. While this project is still in progress, we are working to replicate this process for other programs within Vanguard, and the processes to-come in the future. Upon rethinking the user flows and how people experience the product, we have successfully created something that can properly scale to unlimited heights.