why we did it

THe Challenge

My role: Lead UX and UI designer, I worked closely with the team at GDIT to gather their ideas, hear their challenges and interpret them for the new site.

Tools: Axure, Sketch

GDIT is one part of General Dynamics but boasts six core capabilities of its' own. What this means is that we worked with A LOT of different people to create this product.

The GDIT team was stuck with an outdated design system, which had forced several of the capability groups to go rogue and build their own offshoot sites. Our challenge was to bring all of the capabilities back together under one GDIT family in a way that provided flexibility for the individual needs of each group.

Axure Wireframe Prototype

A large part of our planning phase focused around how to organize the mass of content that existed today, identify the content that still needed to be created and find a clear way to display that information to users.

before & after

a look at the design

note to self: a good idea can be distracting

Sometimes you brilliantly solve problems which you have, in fact, unknowingly invented that distract from the true task at hand. My team and I came up with an incredible dashboard. We called it The Command Center, and we were very proud of ourselves.

The Command Center would help information gatherers tag information into their dashboards (because there is a lot of it within GDIT). This would make it easier for them to share these tagged items internally with a higher, decision-making figure which ideally would create more leads for GDIT. GDIT would be able to suggest other relevant programs based on the content that was tagged by the user. They could assign a point of contact to the user and even allow them to contact straight from the dashboard.

It was a great idea!...but it was so complex we didn't know how we would make it happen within the budget. As the project continued on it became clear that the hardest problem we had to solve was going to be organizing the content that exists on the site, and getting all the teams within the different capabilities to update their content. Our brilliant idea distracted us from the true challenges at hand. So, we refocused and learned something valuable in the process.

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