We helped a military retail company discover how to improve life on base by facilitating co-design sessions with active duty military members. This research shaped the roadmap for a brand new mobile application for each military base.
10 weeks
270 survey responses
2 military bases visited
45 research participants
1 ideation workshop
Research Director
Design Researcher (me)
UX Designer
Data Scientist
client communications, plan methodology, facilitate group sessions & workshop, create deliverables, presentation.
The Army & Air Force Exchange Service is a retail and services provider for military families around the world. They operate more than 4,000 facilities on military bases, including large retail stores, gas stations, food courts, movie theaters, etc. One hundred percent of Exchange earnings is invested back into the military community to fund Quality-of-Life programs such as recreation centers, youth services, and more.
AAFES was in the process of developing a brand new mobile application with the goal of "improving life on-base for military members and their families." However, they started developing the app without understanding what would be valuable to people living on military bases. They brought us in to uncover the needs of military families in order to create a strategic roadmap for their brand new mobile application.
Our stakeholders decided to target Fort Bragg and Fort Campbell as research locations because of their representative populations and variety of services & amenities. However, we did not have the budget to pay for a formal recruiter, so we had to get creative when recruiting participants. We suggested 3 ways to recruit: have the base Commander send out an email, post from the AAFES Facebook page, and ask store employees to recruit people at food courts. Surprisingly, the in-person recruiting at the food courts was by far the best method to find participants. Next, we created groups of participants based on the following categories: Single enlisted 18-29, Married enlisted 18-29, Married enlisted 29+, Spouses, Officers, & Retirees.
Priming Survey: a 'homework' survey was sent out to participants to collect ideas for potential generative toolkit stimuli, as well as to prime research participants before our in-depth generative toolkit sessions.
Generative Toolkits: We created stimuli stickers related to military careers, family life, finances, health, recreation, shopping, & social life to spark deeper, meaningful conversations.
Photo-ethnography: After our generative toolkit discussions, we explored both bases to take photos of places and things we learned about. These photos helped paint a more vivid picture of life on a military base.
After synthesizing all of our data, we asked several designers on our larger team to join us in a quick ideation session to generate concepts based on our insights. We showed our teammates quotes from participants and 'How might we' statements to spark their creativity. After this workshop, we grouped ideas into different categories that we used in a working session with our stakeholders.
We facilitated a workshop to present our insights & design concepts to the mobile app working team with the goal of determining the business risks of each concept & building a future app roadmap for the team to align around. We used the value proposition canvas to guide our stakeholders through our research findings and design concepts.
For our presentation, we created personas to help our stakeholders empathize with their various types of customers. Using photos from our photo-ethnography, we created storyboards to inform our stakeholders about the various struggles on life on-base for each of our personas. This allowed us to craft a series of stories about what it's actually like to live on base, which we hoped with stick with the senior stakeholders into the future.
Lastly, we prioritized all of the app features based on user value and business risk so they could figure out where to focus next. Senior stakeholders found value in understanding their customers at a deeper level, not only to inform the app, but also to inform the broader business strategy. This was the first time our client had be exposed to UX Research, but after seeing the value of talking to users, they decided to do more work with us in the future to further refine their application.
"Surround yourself with people who know what you don't know. Become enticed by the unknown." - Linda B. Smith
© 2021 Braden King