3.1 UX Principles

Establishing anchoring user experience principles allows us a mechanism to instill consistency across the breadth of USAF Logistics Information Systems’ portfolio. These principles represent goals at a high, abstract level of the user’s experience, but should be reflected in the design and execution of specific capabilities wherever applicable.

In this way, we can know that even where specific interactions and interface components will differ per the respective requirements of a given system, as long as they are successfully fulfilling the same larger UX principle, an overarching consistency of purpose, experience, and mission support is being met.

Referring to these principles consistently over time offers decision-making guidance, from strategic efforts (e.g. prioritizing features) to tactical execution (e.g. determining specific interactions and system flows).

To best serve the logistics community and its missions, systems should adhere to the following eight interrelated UX principles:

3.1.1 Enable Clear and Immediate Decision Support

Paramount to a system’s ability to support its mission is highly effective user enablement, especially for logistics information systems in the area of decision-making. To that end, a system’s design should first and foremost support this critical function. Proper enablement includes:

• Intuitive and easily repeatable task flows for arriving at decision-supporting information.
• Formatting and presenting decision-supporting information in a way that facilitates subsequent steps (either within or outside of the system).
• Providing appropriate descriptions, context, and caveats with data to better inform decision-making.
• Favoring recognition over recall by the user. The user can select from clearly presented options instead of recalling codes or meanings. Options are reduced to only those that are applicable in context. Plain-text descriptions are offered wherever data is coded.

All of this requires that users and their key tasks and decisions are understood deeply by the system owners and designers.

3.1.2 Promote Data Integrity and Accuracy

Data lies at the heart of logistics information systems and processes. Faithful representation and management of this data, then, is crucial to mission success for their users. For users to have confidence in a system’s data, they must understand how the system works. Further, a policy of data transparency will improve the data’s accuracy over time and build trust in its systems. Enterprise-wide data integrity and accuracy can be ensured by:

• Never obscuring or correcting problematic source data. Instead, at a minimum, intend to notify the user of possible issues and, optimally, offer means to resolving issues.
• Indicating from where data is sourced and, where relevant, the business logic applied by the system to create the displayed data.
• Minimizing the possibility of human error. Use structured inputs wherever possible, reduce options to only those that are allowable by business rules, and offer rich type-ahead suggestions where a user needs more open-ended data entry or query.

This principle requires system owners and designers to have thorough expertise in relevant technical orders and their system’s contributing source systems.

3.1.3 Streamline Common Tasks and Analyses

Making common tasks and analyses more efficient for the end user allows the system to maximize its value to the user and to the mission overall. The system’s design should favor its users’ most frequent needs by streamlining its flows and interfaces toward those ends. Some means toward that goal include:

• Emphasizing most commonly used functions.
• Allowing users to individually save settings, custom searches, and tool preferences.
• Providing smart defaults wherever possible. This ranges from pre-selecting the most common form field options to displaying the most commonly used features or sections upon initial login.

Successfully following this principle requires comprehensively researching your users’ intents and monitoring system usage.

3.1.4 Tailor Tasks and Interfaces to Roles

Too often, DoD systems err by attempting to do everything for everyone, and by doing so, ultimately impede the mission. Offering users the right content and functionality for their needs and assignments is a meaningful way to support the above UX principles, but also to aid mission attainment. Ways to tailor the experience include:

• Emphasizing or exposing interfaces or portions of interfaces, especially for data entry and transactional functions, to only those user roles with a need and authority for said functionality.
• Designing task flows and interfaces so that they at a minimum support, but optimally increase the efficiency of, the larger assignment beyond the system for key end-user groups.
• Reducing data inputs, and options within those inputs, to only those that are meaningful and relevant to the user’s role and their current context.

3.1.5 Provide Clear System Status

Clear, consistent status indication and feedback is a certain measure for instilling trust in users and providing a sense of confidence and control within the system. With this sense of control, users do not have to split their attention between managing the system and contextualizing its responses and outputs, and can instead focus entirely on quickly and accurately accomplishing their end goal. A system should clearly report its status by:

• Indicating the recency and providing a detailed status of its source systems.
• Providing up-to-date context for the content and data presented by the system.
• Utilizing consistent enterprise metaphors for indicating status, such as stoplight coloring, at both the system and individual data record levels.
• Telling the user when it is busy processing their request, and, if the response is expected to take longer than a few seconds, offering an indication of how much longer the response will take or what percent of the process is complete.

3.1.6 Prioritize Alerts and Exceptions

As the nature of many tasks within the logistics community includes attending to conspicuous, outlying data and “greening up” problem areas, many users can greatly benefit by having these situations brought to their attention systematically, instead of by someone up or down the chain of command, or by hunting through data themselves. Where appropriate then, systems should prioritize alerts and exceptions to support this type of task by:

• Alerting users where problems may exist in the source data or in calculations made by the system with uncertain source data.
• Highlighting metrics that are below target goals, limits, or enterprise standards.
• Offering deeper assessments with explanations, breakdowns, or drivers of metrics and calculations.

3.1.7 Ensure Fast Findability

Due to the inherent urgency of some mission support tasks, systems should be designed to allow users to quickly find information. Some means to assist this include:

• Providing smart defaults on interface configurations and search parameters.
• Tailoring data reports to include unrequested but meaningful supporting data alongside the user’s requested information, sparing the user a second query or deeper analysis.
• Allowing users to individually save settings, custom searches, and tool preferences.
• Adhering to visual design best practices for clear presentation of content and data.

3.1.8 Reduce Reliance on Externalities

Fragmented experiences are too often the norm, whether it be requiring users to jump between systems, or referencing paper documents or print materials. Pulling as much information and as many sub-tasks as makes sense into a user’s primary system of need can consolidate work and reduce fragmentation. The end result is an allowance for the user to give more attention to their actual end goals and less on managing tools, thereby supporting the above principles of faster, more streamlined decision-making.

• Providing plain-text descriptions of acronyms and codes.
• Optimizing system task flows to seamlessly fit into larger external processes.
• Digitizing paper processes, especially where immediate transcription back into a digital system is expected.