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UX: Making Military Systems Warrior Friendly

An editorial brief sponsored by Visual Logic

SITREP The pistol grip, the iPhone, and the Google homepage all have one thing in common—they feel right and are intuitive so that users don’t need an instruction manual to work them. For the most part in the military, however, such human-centered design is a rarity in systems being deployed to tactical forces and security operations center (SOC) analysts.

The pendulum is now swinging the other way as users are demanding more intuitive user experiences (UX), which is driving the design of new products and the redesign of older ones. For the military, UX can be mission critical. Seconds matter for warfighters. Clear, accurate and accessible data is non-negotiable. Making the right decisions is an imperative.

UX and human-centered design addresses more than just the user interface. It is about placing the person in the forefront of product design and includes all aspects of users’ interaction with systems. This lets personnel make well-informed decisions and attain a level of empowerment based on the usefulness of the system.

Engineers and product developers are using human-centered design processes to reduce the time it takes to identify emerging threats and reprogram airborne payloads, decrease cognitive load in tactical sensors/effectors, and increase sustainability of fielded assets, to name a few.

UX is about trying to make interactions useful, usable, and desirable—all attributes that are equally relevant to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. For example, all the services have aviation platforms, with some strategic, others tactical and include both manned and unmanned platforms. Three of the four services operate boats, even though the size of their respective vessels differ. And all of them employ command and control, battle management, and situational awareness systems.

As such, the common and shared need to understand and improve UX is a DoD-wide imperative.

– Barry Rosenberg, Contributing Editor Technology & Special Projects

Pictured Below: Army Reserve soldiers from the 305th Engineer Company (Route Clearance), Camp Pendleton, CA., train on the new Husky Mounted Detection System, which was upgraded with a user-centric graphical user interface in-cab touch-screen display to detect plastic IEDs.

One the cover: The goal of improved user experience is to transfer the complexity of a product or system away from the user and place it on the engineering/product team. Shown is a U.S. soldier with an Engineer Troop in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment controlling a Talon explosive ordnance disposal robot from inside an armored vehicle during training at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Grafenwoehr, Germany.

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Military UX and UX in the Military The user interface is the point at which the system and human interact. All military systems have user interfaces that generally operate through direct manipulation. This includes everything from display screens, keyboards, knobs, and buttons, to joysticks, handheld controllers, steering wheels, lug nuts, jacks, wrenches, cable connectors, zippers, rip cords, Velcro, and even Meals Ready to Eat.

The point of interaction depends on the platform. If you’re in a vehicle, it’s going to be the dashboard and the ergonomics of seating. It’s the same thing for aviation platforms. For software, it’s going to be the onscreen buttons, menus, checkboxes, and navigation. For communication devices, it’s increasingly a voice user interface like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. Soon there will be brain-to-computer interfaces.

The origins of UX trace back to the mid-1980s and the writings/teachings of author/professor Don Norman. who introduced the term “user-centered design” in the title of a 1986 book he co-edited. “People are so adaptable that they are capable of shouldering the entire burden of accommodation to an artifact, but skillful designers make large parts of this burden vanish by adapting the artifact to the users,” he wrote in the introduction, several years before joining Apple as its vice president of advanced technology.

In his view, the connection between the human interface and usability were too limited, and that all aspects of a person’s experience with a system should be addressed. With that concept in mind, the Army also began studying UX in the 1980s and established the Manpower and Personnel Integration program, better known as MANPRINT under what is now known as the Human Systems Integration Division (HSID) at U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM), Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD.

“Human systems integration (HSI) was established in response to concerns that human error was causing equipment failures and that soldier-system performance was not being maximized resulting in poor UX,” explained Pam Savage-Knepshield, research psychologist at HSID.

“Army HSI has focused on placing the human element in the system-acquisition process, putting the soldier on equal footing with hardware, software, and other design criteria.”

Army efforts in HSI focus on seven areas of emphasis that sit at the intersection of the human and the system. Each area addresses what it takes to operate, train, maintain, and sustain a system but from different aspects of the UX equation.

1. Manpower focuses on the number of military and civilian personnel needed to address all aspects of a system’s life cycle.

2. Personnel focuses on the capabilities that users need to possess: cognitive, social, and physical.

3. Training addresses both individual and unit skill development.

4. Human-factors engineering focuses on the consideration of human characteristics and how to optimize and augment human performance through system design.

5. Habitability looks at the physical environment such as ventilation and lighting, living conditions, quality of life, and morale.

6. Safety and occupational health focus on minimizing the risk of illness, disability, injury, and

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“ While UX within the military is not driving product design at the scale we see in the private sector, military leadership and planners know they must adopt these enabling capabilities,” said Kevin Hair, president and chief executive officer of SRC. Shown is an SRC engineer setting up a system developed for the U.S. military.

death to operators and maintainers.

7. Force protection and survivability is protecting troops from direct threats that range from kinetics to cyber and electronic warfare, as well as chemical, biological, and nuclear threats.

Some Army acquisition programs have

tried to address early HSI and UX through what’s called soldier-centered design where soldier input and feedback is gathered via their participation in design activities. However, that doesn’t occur as routinely as envisioned.

“In some cases, I think it’s due to us not being on board early enough to influence contractual deliverables that will ensure that UX is appropriately addressed,” said Savage-Knepshield. “Our developers, vendors, and contractors should be involved in early user-needs analysis and should also be conducting participatory design with us.”

What happens when they don’t is that UX considerations are not included in the contractual language in DoD Requests for Proposal (RFPs). Doing so would require competitors bidding on particular programs to show how UX is part of their bid offerings. When UX is not included in source selection, contractors typically ignore it so they can bid a lower price.

UX can also be inadequate when a vendor has already fabricated or prototyped a design or when commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products are involved.

“What we end up doing in these cases is identifying issues and enhancements, and feeding them to a vendor with the hopes that they will consider them when there are future releases of that piece of equipment,” said Savage-Knepshield. “Much of our focus on COTS will be on training, job aids, and safety considerations because our strict military standards for use in harsh environments were likely not considered during development of a COTS product.”

On the positive side, Savage-Knepshield said she is starting to see UX being included in RFPs more regularly. She mentioned two systems that have included UX in program requirements in recent years: (1) the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) fire support command-and-control system used by Army and Marine Corps units to provide automated support for planning, coordinating, controlling and executing fires and effects; and (2) the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN), a ground station for all-domain operations that can ingest data from air and space assets to provide targeting data for the Army’s long-range precision fires.

Another positive note is that the military services are starting to place UX experts in positions of influence, most notably the Air Force, which named Colt Whittal chief experience officer in 2019.

Areas Where Military UX Needs the Most Attention? Even though the military started to address UX in earnest in the 1980s, it has been cognizant of UX benefits since World War II when it required aircraft manufacturers to design clearer, more logical controls and displays in order to increase survivability. Too often, though, UX has been subject to the same syndrome that has so long afflicted cybersecurity.Namely, that it has often been left out of the early design/development stages of a product and had to be bolted on at the end. That’s what we as a society are experiencing today with advanced persistent threats on the Internet, which was created by the military and popularized by early Internet service providers like AOL without inherent security. When millions of people saw their personal data pilfered from the Office of Personnel Management in 2015 or when Colonial Pipeline was hacked and shut down its East Coast pipeline network in 2021, the response was a frantic scramble to bolt on better security that should have been there from the beginning.

That invariably leads to sub-nominal security and performance. For example, software developers have been using agile processes for application development for many years now—the process known as DevOps—but only recently have they acknowledged the importance of cybersecurity by amending the term to DevSecOps.

“While UX within the military is not driving product design at the scale we see in the private sector, military leadership and planners know they must adopt these enabling capabilities,” said Kevin Hair, president and chief executive officer of SRC, an independent, not-for-profit, research and development corporation chartered by the state of New York.

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Pam Savage-Knepshield, research psychologist, Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM), Analysis Center, Human Systems Integration Div.

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“The disconnect comes mostly because the acquisition and testing of systems adheres to a technical specification or set of requirements. So, yes, at this stage, if you have not built systems with usability principles in mind, your only option is to bolt them on afterwards.”

The farther the end user is from the requirements-setting

process, the less likely it becomes for the final product to be optimized for smoother usability.

Hair suggests that more can be done to research, collect, and test a user’s ability to meet operational objectives and then flow the results into the DoD requirements setting and acquisition process. An additional hurdle is that many requirements are classified, “so using proxy personas, or developing ways to embed the user’s needs in the design process, will allow us to design with the end-user in mind.”

It seems that regardless of the system, the most problematic aspects of UX in the military are system set-up, configuration, communications and networking, interoperability, and associated troubleshooting, according to Savage-Knepshield.

“Many of our systems are using 30-year old software and hardware designs,” she observed. “As we modernize them, we are leveraging the learning our users have gained from interacting with commercial systems such as web apps and smartphones. After all, how many of us have had to attend 120 hrs of training to use our phones?”

This transfer of knowledge will become increasingly important as the proliferation of enemy threats outpaces the amount of people and resources available to counter all threats across the battlefield. Where it makes sense, Hair recommends the development of new Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) job descriptions to help the military conduct successful missions within the constraints of limited resources. We’re starting to see some of that as the Army is creating new multi-domain units whose focus is on cyber and electronic warfare.

“In creating this decentralized structure for combined cyber/electronic warfare at the tactical level, there may not be enough electronic warfare officers to assign, and infantry troops might soon be shaping battles in the cyber domain,” explained Hair. “Multi-domain units will need to understand the effects of the technology without understanding the underlying technology itself. If the requirements and the materiel solutions are very intuitive, the learning curve is dramatically cut for the warfighter. The cognitive load on the user is optimized and allows for sound tactical actions and decisions.”

That is especially important in tactical situations where the warfighter is faced with complexity upon complexity. Kurt Vander Wiel, partner in a company called Visual Logic that specializes in UX for military systems, provided an example of complexity upon complexity.

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The Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System is a system with good UX, according to Pam Savage-Knepshield. AFATDS provides automated support for coordinating and executing fires and effects such as mortars.

Kevin Hair, president and chief executive officer of SRC, an independent, not-for-profit, research and development corporation chartered by the state of New York.

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“We had a requirement for a soldier standing in place to be able to control a ground robot, but it turned out the soldier never stood in place. He’s running and trying to take cover inside a building at the same time he’s operating the robot. Each function has a high cognitive load individually, and added together they were not doable with the initial interface. So we redesigned the interface to be much simpler knowing that the soldier was moving.”

UX and 4th Industrial Revolution TechnologiesThere are a variety of trends driving the need for better UX, with much of it coming from our daily experiences with commercial technology and the obvious gap between military systems and what is commercially available at Costco, for example.

For good or bad, that drives user adoption as a product in the field is not useful if it is so complex that it requires a half-dozen switches to start. In fact, it may not get used at all. Another driver is that the military is harnessing the power of innovation through agile product and software development capabilities that leverage UX design and human-centered design principles.

“An even more profound driver is that the generation of warfighters we have today are digital natives,” said Hair. “They are defined by the fact that they only know the world through a digital experience, for the most part. They grew up with mobile devices that made whatever they were doing easier. As a result, they are less tolerant of poor user experience because they know that it does not have to be that way.”

Expectation management is critical to a technology’s UX. The user must understand what a system is capable of doing. It needs to communicate to the user what it is doing and where it is in the process relative to achieving its goal or task.

“We know that automation is brittle, it’s not perfect,” said Savage-Knepshield. “After all, it was designed by us imperfect humans. We also know that technology fails at the most inopportune times. Put the two together and you can have a recipe for disaster. If the UX and the human-system interaction hasn’t been appropriately considered during design, expectation management will not be their scaffolding to help that user when something fails. The user has to understand what a system is capable of doing.”

With artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), in particular, when the system makes a mistake it needs to be readily apparent to the user so that he/she can take corrective action. If the system should become degraded or fail, the user needs to be aware of the AI’s process, intentions, and progress in order to pick up where it left off and resume operations manually. And in the case of ML itself, you want the system to benefit from the teaching moment.

“As military systems become more autonomous and smarter, system transparency and trust in the system becomes even more critical to the user and UX especially given the high stakes of their use on the battlefield,” said Savage-Knepshield.

“Trust has to be earned and it is an easy thing to lose.

“It develops through human-system interaction during which the user develops an understanding of the system and comes to believe through successful interaction that

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Pam Savage-Knepshield conducting usability testing with soldiers at Fort Riley, KS.

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the system would never do anything intentionally to undermine the trust of its user. When trust in a system is lost, users will find another way to accomplish their goals. Manual/analog ways and the equipment will end up on a shelf in a CONEX (military shipping container).”

Trust is also a vital UX issue for other 4th Industrial Revolution technologies like cloud computing, with security, lag time, and understanding the cloud being other UX concerns. For 5G, the improvement in transmission speed and low latency will require better interfaces for high-bandwidth technologies such as augmented reality and 3D gaming that will come into play in immersive training environments. User interfaces for the multitude of Internet of Things devices like smartwatches and smart security systems are another UX concern, as is the ability to remotely update all these systems.

Quantifying the Benefits of UXIn an effort to make products and experiences useful, usable, and desirable, it is natural for organizations to wade into that space in reverse, according to Visual Logic partner Andy Van Fleet. Rather than starting with “useful,” they begin with desirable by trying to make the interface look better with new graphics, for example.

“The processes and skills involved are just easier to understand if you work it backwards from desirable to usable to useful,” said Van Fleet. “But the better, more impactful strategy is to understand what’s useful to a soldier and what’s actually going to change things in the field, as opposed to just trying to make things look or feel better.”

User research is at the center of this and how organizations like SRC provide warfighters with better UX, making sure there is a clear understanding of why and how a user needs to interact with a product or capability—not just what the customer is asking a developer to build.

“We’re then going to measure our design decisions with a suite of usability metrics that give us insights on our user’s comprehension and efficiency while using our products,” said Hair, calling this a human-centered design process. “If we’re intentional about iteratively validating and testing with end users, we will be able to see many measurable differences.”

This includes reduced soldier training times, increased task efficiency, fewer calls to field support representatives to fix problems, and lowered life cycle costs. Ideally, it will allow for fewer specialized MOS roles, as Hair mentioned earlier.

To quantify the benefits of UX, the Army also determines what the most important aspects are to its soldier constituency of users, and chooses metrics that will measure those aspects, followed by tracking to see how design changes impact them.

“One of our usability targets is that 85 percent of those who have completed Advanced Individual Training will be able to complete critical tasks on the first attempt,” said Savage-Knepshield. “This is also how we define intuitiveness. If 85 percent of the soldiers can walk up and use the system without training, I call that system pretty intuitive. Once soldiers have used the system’s embedded help or attended new equipment training, the target is increased to 90 percent.”

Quantifying the benefits of better UX generally takes the form of measuring improvements over time for things such as task completion rates and time, user satisfaction, cognitive workload, physical workload, and reduction in training time. Those can all be considered returns on investment for UX.

The TakeawaysUX makes the biggest difference to military users when developers and engineers look at an entire product ecosystem rather than just a physical or digital interface. It is about stepping back and understanding the user’s end-to-end experience, whether it be a soldier working a handheld controller for a robotic vehicle in the field, an airman responding to security information and event management alerts in a SOC, or a Navy crewman piloting a riverine craft for Special Forces.

There’s a law in UX known as the “conservation of complexity,” which was defined by a contemporary of Don Norman named Larry Tesler while working at Xerox PARC. It’s a principle that says a task is as complicated as it is, and either the user deals with the complexity or the system deals with the complexity.

The challenge for both the military and private sector—and it is going to require work, money, and time to get done—is to transfer the complexity now being shouldered by the user and shift it left to the developers and their companies designed products, systems, and applications.

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“ A task is as complicated as it is, and either the user deals with the complexity or the system deals with the complexity.”

Breaking Defense: What’s driving the need for better UX in the military?

Van Fleet: Systems have become quite complicated. We have great technology, which is constantly being improved, but quite often the end user has been left to deal with the complexity of these systems. The challenge now is to make systems technically advanced while taking complexity away from the end user. That reduces the amount of training that they have to go through and also increases their situational awareness while decreasing their cognitive load.

In order for systems to be less complicated for the end users, companies need to dedicate time to deal with that complexity through product change and engineering change. Figuring out the complexity must be dealt with by the teams that are working to build the systems. What happens then is that the end user has a much easier, less-costly technology to use that is drastically reduced in complexity.

Vander Wiel: Sensors and ongoing diagnostics for technically complex military systems are producing tons of data. In most cases, you see all that data just being dumped onto a screen, and the user ends up having to siphon through all those graphs, charts, and numbers and make sense of it themselves. If more research could be done up front so that we can better understand the user, we should be able to organize and filter that information down to just the things that they actually need. Oftentimes you find that a lot of that information is only necessary one percent of the time, so from the users’ perspective it makes sense to remove it from the screen and place it in a more appropriate location.

Breaking Defense: What military systems could benefit the most attention from improved UX?

Van Fleet: The answer is all of them, specifically in the area of system simplification so that training time can be drastically reduced so that users can pick up on a particular system in a very short amount of time and know how it could be used. We don’t have time anymore to train

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Visual Logic provides human-centered design consulting, better known as user experience (UX), for DoD contractors who are modernizing software applications, building advanced vehicle dashboards, mission critical consoles, and demonstrating innovative research and development concepts, to name a few. The company has extensive expertise in helping to improve usability and accelerating training for DoD systems like missile defense, ground robotics, counter UAS, missile defense, and cybersecurity dashboards, including the following projects for the U.S. Army.

Husky Mounted Detection System (HMDS)Created a user-centric graphical user interface (GUI) for the Husky Mounted Detection System (HMDS) in-cab touch-screen display to detect plastic IEDs. Visual Logic was a subcontractor to NIITEK on a $579 million award.

Minestalker - Humanitarian De-mining (HD) SystemPioneered a new GUI used by the Minestalker vehicle deployed through the Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center to assist in humanitarian de-mining efforts in Angola and Cambodia. We built a touch-screen GUI with 3D subsurface threat visualization to provide operators with confidence in counter-mine operations.

Remote Visualization (RVIS) 3D GUIThe company designed RVIS GUI for the HMDS road clearance vehicles in Afghanistan. RVIS GUI provided second threat analysts views of live counter-mine operations. Innovations included 3D visualization of buried explosives. Visual Logic acted as subcontractor to NIITEK on an $18 million award.

MineShark Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) & Metal Detector (MD)Visual Logic designed the GUI for NIITEK’s handheld GPR/MD detector used to identify metallic landmines and plastic IEDs. Technological advancements allowed operators to visualize buried explosives, ensuring a high degree of confidence in counter explosive operations.

In this Q&A, we discuss how the military can better execute missions by improving UX with Visual Logic partners Andy Van Fleet and Kurt Vander Wiel.

VIEWPOINT FROM VISUAL LOGIC

WHICH SYSTEMS CAN BE IMPROVED WITH BETTER UX? ALL OF THEM.

Visual Logic Partner Andy Van Fleet.

Visual Logic Partner Kurt Vander Wiel.

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Breaking Defense thanks Visual Logic for supporting this editorial E-Brief. Sponsorship does not influence the editorial content of the E-Brief.

VIEWPOINT FROM VISUAL LOGIC

people on systems for six to nine months. They need to be able to use systems almost immediately with minimal training, and that is what the military is starting to gravitate toward.

Breaking Defense: How can UX help warfighters make better use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)?

Van Fleet: With those technologies, we’re going to start to be able to understand how the user makes decisions and what information they need to make those decisions. Let’s take this question up a level. Using missile defense as an example, let’s say that there’s an incoming missile. Today, the user looks at the data and decides, based on his training, whether that is a missile or not, whether it’s hostile or not, and whether it’s something we should shoot at or not.

In the future, those kinds of decisions are going to be better made by AI/ML. We will be able to bring the user up to one higher level of extraction in order to make decisions on specific actions and in which order they should happen. Instead of having him down in the weeds trying to decide whether this is, in fact, a threat, the user can be making higher-level executive decisions.Breaking Defense: How will UX help him make those higher-level decisions?

Van Fleet: First of all, it’s going to be helping to define those decisions. Right now the military is used to diving down in the weeds but it doesn’t need to do that. Give them the numbers, tell them what the numbers mean, and let them make the higher-order decisions.

AI/ML will also play an important role in presenting data, especially when things start happening fast, when they’re happening in swarms, when things are happening outside of a user’s ability to process. User experience is one of the elements we need to help decide how we are even going to deal with that challenge. If there are a thousand incoming drones, how are we going to tell you which ones are the most important ones to think about? We don’t have all the answers to that yet. That’s exactly the work that needs to be done.

Vander Wiel: You probably heard of the phrase “commander’s intent.” The human will start to tell the device a commander’s intent, as opposed to telling the device “do this exact thing.” Picture an autonomous vehicle trying to keep itself inside the lane. What’s the human’s job there? It’s to tell the car, “I want to go here or go there. I want to be in this lane, now I want to switch to that lane,” and the car is doing all the small things of keeping you within the lane.

So the higher level thought process possible with UX will make it possible for the system to deal with questions like

“What’s my intent?” “What am I trying to accomplish?” What am I trying to defend against?” That’s where the human is more valuable and you let the AI/ML do its job.