The Problem

My primary responsibility as the Senior UI/UX Designer for the simulation half of project Stormbreaker was to ensure the needs and wants of the military planners were heard and provided for. This meant frequent meetings to discuss what they wanted and how I could translate a system that, up until this project, had been achieved mainly with “pencil and paper”. Another huge pain point was the turn around time for simulations. So all solutions I needed to offer had to be intuitive for anyone that might use it in order to allow simulations to be accessable to any planner regardless of their knowledge or experience level.

To facilitate the collaborative effort I relocated from Seattle, WA to Oahu, HI. This allowed me to meet directly with not just our in house planners, but also planners and members from other branches of the military.

It was exciting to design solutions that would allow the planners to setup and execute wargames of different complexities and scales. The wargames would require units from all three branches of the military to interact with one another, provide logistics, move around the map, be given orders, etc. It' was a rewarding and complex undertaking to translate their tranditional system into the digital world.