Laboratory for Analytic Sciences

Tools

Figma

After Effects

Miro

Role

UX/UI Designer


Objective

Design an interface using the affordances of machine learning to provide a personalized user experience so that intelligence analysts can quickly and knowledgeably enter their day’s workflow.


Collaborators

Elizabeth Gabriel — Designer

Jillian Swaim – Designer

Problem

Intelligence analysts have been tasked to provide indications and warnings of potential terrorist actions against US interests. Many of the terrorists have never been identified, and are scattered all around the globe. They are members of different but often linked organizations and can be called upon at any time to unleash acts of terrorism of many different sorts. Chloe is faced with lots of "dots" in the form of intelligence data that come from many different sources. Her first task is to decide which dots she should be trying to connect and then to make inferences about what these connections may mean. This is the basic step in generating hypotheses about what these connected "dots'' might mean.

Process

Before heading into Figma, Miro was our home for collaborating on notes and research

We started by developing a persona for Chloe, the analyst reporter. We were very specific about her work style, personality traits, and motivations. From there we constructed two task flows, making sure to identify potential pain points.

Chloe's persona and task flows

Chloe's task flow

Next we conducted interviews with five real intelligence analysts. I have blurred the faces of the interviewees out of respect for their privacy.

We jotted down some key take aways from these interviews and started to brainstorm some opportunities for improvement.

Takeaways and opportunities

We did a lot of independent sketching before coming back together as a team.

Pulling from that batch of sketches, we started to refine some of them into more complete ideas.

Spin Style Queries concept

Lots of whiteboarding sessions

Prototypes

The final prototypes were created in Figma

We created a variety of high fidelity mockups before settling on a direction.

When the analyst gets to work in the morning and opens up their Atlas software, they see a summary of their day's work.

All new reports are summarized by AI in a running text on the left side of the screen. Pre-highlighted words are paired with images and external documents arranged on the right. Emails, customer interests and tag filters are arranged at the bottom of the screen.

Homepage

When the analyst gets to work in the morning and opens up their Atlas software, they see a summary of their day's work.

All new reports are summarized by AI in a running text on the left side of the screen. Pre-highlighted words are paired with images and external documents arranged on the right. Emails, customer interests and tag filters are arranged at the bottom of the screen.

Homepage

The analyst can scroll the report and highlight new key phrases. As they highlight new phrases, new documents (images, reports, coordinates, videos, etc.) appear to the right.

AI will automatically change out tags that are relevant to the highlighted phrases.

Scrolling through the document

The analyst can enlarge images and see details, such as text, highlighted by the AI.

Enlarged image

Selecting a tag will open ll relevant documents to the right. By default, the most important six documents will appear and other documents will stack farther to the right.

The AI will also pull up the most relevant emails, customer interests, and notes at the bottom of the screen.

Enlarged image