My role
I led the product design and media production of a new digital curriculum for West Point’s Department of Military Instruction. I built a team that partnered with clients and senior leadership to align business goals with research insights in order to architect features that best addressed cadet behavior and motivations. To quickly align product vision, I introduced iterative user research and prototyping methods modeled after Google Venture’s Crazy eights framework.
The Challenge
Military Doctrine has not changed format for decades. Though it has become available electronically, it has not leveraged new digital formats to improve information reference, recall, or transfer. Our conceptual challenge was to make military doctrine more engaging in order to improve cadets’ knowledge retention and application in field exercises. The physical challenge was a very short development time, and short tranched content deliveries throughout the semester keeping us just ahead of the cadets’ course schedules.
The Approach
We chose to break apart military doctrine and group it around West Point’s teaching modules so that the course directors could more precisely curate the content. Information patterns, study tools, quizzes, reference hyperlinks, and immersive interactive exercises were woven into the content at a rhythm that would foster feedback loops to improve knowledge retention. We designed and developed the new curriculum with a tablet first, web-based, mindset.
With little time left to the start of the Fall semester we favored an agile approach to product design, development, and content production. Features would be added concurrently with new content. This meant that we would retroactively add content to older sections of the curriculum as we moved forward and tested new features. This made the delivery process more of a scoping mechanism for a beta product than a clearly delineated series of stages before launch.
The Discovery
We conducted initial surveys with cadets and course instructors to understand the product parameters. This initial research revealed an emphasis on study tools and learning aides, but our iterative user testing during the delivery process provided insights that ran counter to our initial findings. While users highly valued media like photography, video, audio, and 3d imagery before using the product, we found that they paid very little attention to them in practice. They were focused on text, simple interactive diagrams, and study tools. This discovery saved us a lot of time because the production of high quality visual media was seriously straining the team’s resources while adding little value to the end user. We were able to refocus our efforts on providing more concise interactive walkthroughs and improving the reading experience around the idea of “quick bites” of content.
