UX Team Content and Design
Leading
General Dynamics Mission Systems - UX Center of Excellence
Challenge
The UX Center of Excellence within General Dynamics Mission Systems was experiencing a lack of understanding with external audiences as to what the User Experience Center of Excellence could provide programs. I was challenged to lead the creation of new messaging and designs for the external facing website for the UX COE as a way to help audiences better understand our value.
Existing Messaging
Establishing Goals and Defining the Audience
I began by establishing the goals for the content rewrite:
- To convey the value in hiring the User Experience team on a GDMS project.
- To convey where in the engineering process User Experience fits into a GDMS project.
- To explain the value of including UX safety experts in a GDMS project.
- To explain the value of including UX usability experts in a GDMS project.
- Keep it short and simple.
- To recruit new members to the UX COE team.
From these goals I was able to identify the target audience and establish where the messaging should be applied to accomplish our goals.
Content Writing
With the goals defined and the audience identified I was able to outline the content to match current GDMS external messaging styling and gain Stakeholder support for the content outline.
Evaluating the Content
After the content was written I tasked a team researcher (Stephen Humeston) with evaluating the effectiveness of the new content by asking open ended questions of participants in order to gain insights on what kind of content would be most effective in meeting the goals established.
Wireframing
After the content was revised based on the results of the open-ended questions, the content was rewritten, and reviewed with Stakeholders. I then tasked a team designer (Naureen Saira) to create wireframes based on the current styling and content management system that General Dynamics was employing to host their external website content.
Usability Testing Wireframes
User Testing of the content wireframes v10 and content was tested by Stephen Humeston with users both external and internal to provide the team with feedback allowing us to iterate the content and begin high fidelity designs.
High-Fidelity Designs
High-fidelity designs were created, by Naureen Saira, to include the feedback gathered during usability testing and incorporating the GDMS external website styling guidelines.
Usability Testing High-Fidelity Designs
Stephen Humeston then conducted usability testing on the high-fidelity version gathering one last round of insights allowing the team to iterate and reach a final design.
Video Production
In order to better recruit new User Experience designers and researchers to the team, I proposed creating a video that focused on the personal stories of existing team members which would have more impact on the audience members than content alone. Having had a background in video production, I was able to write the script, conduct the interviews and produce the video.
Final Designs and Implementation
Final designs were created, and I implemented the designs in late 2020 on the GDMS external website using a content management system.
