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Which Systems Can Be Improved With Better UX? All Of them.

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, 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) System

• Pioneered 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. Visual Logic built a touch-screen GUI with 3D subsurface threat visualization to provide operators with confidence in counter-mine operations.

Remote Visualization (RVIS) 3D GUI

• The 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.

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 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.