U.S. Air Force: F-35

End-to-end RBAC web app Design prioritizing secure access

Torque F-35 Jet Maintenance User Access Authorization

Year

2020

Tools

Whimsical, Balsamiq, Figma

Deliverables

Workflow diagrams

Wireframes

High-fidelity mocks & prototype

Product Team

My Team

1 Product manager

7 Developers

2 Designers (lead/junior)

My Role

Lead designer

Researcher

Research

3 Field studies

31 Individual interviews

7 Focus groups

Summary

The U.S. Air Force and its allied partners use the F-35 jet, and therefore need to maintain it. Maintenance of an F-35 is a large portion of the $60,000 per flight hour that each sortie racks up. It can be done much faster, with more reliability and system status awareness with the use of an online platform with digital records and updates to the current analog methods of pen and paper. Torque is designed to meet these maintenance needs, and each maintainer, supervisor, and pilot thereby needs to be signed up to the platform, their roles & permissions strictly assigned & limited.

Problem

There are several hundred F-35s in use at various units & bases across different branches of the U.S. military and its allied forces. Many of these systems and processes that grant users access to maintain, supervise, and fly jets are analog, and often vary substantially from unit to unit.

Each unit can substantially benefit from being brought on to the Torque maintenance platform, but a one-size-fits-all approach may deter adoption if it doesn’t allow for accommodation of current workflows, roles, and responsibilities at a given maintenance unit. The goal is efficient, low-touch onboarding of every individual with jet access, though security and auditability cannot be compromised throughout.

Solution must solve for:

Different roles per maintenance unit
Airmen at multiple maintenance units

Research & Process

A junior designer and I flew onto 4 different Air Force bases to interview 31 airmen & conduct 7 focus groups with maintainers, for which I was the lead. We identified 3 distinct user types and numerous variations within each.

Using Whimsical, I captured different possibilities for IA until we found a universal method that worked with each base, mapping our structure to existing workflows.

I produced wireframes with Balsamiq and iterated with feedback in subsequent interviews. Final deliverables were high-fidelity mocks & prototypes in Figma.

Solution

Matrix of several dozen different permissions within the 11-application Torque suite.
Permissions mapped to roles that can be customized per maintenance unit during onboarding.
A dynamic progressive form customized per maintenance unit that an airmen fills out, bringing their current personnel info, maintenance role & permissions online via an access request.
Request queue that a supervisor will use to validate the maintenance need for the request via personal knowledge of the user.
Request queue that a unit security manager will use to approve the access request.
For re-requests & personnel updates, a different structure was implemented to streamline aberrations without compromising security.

Results

Initial trial:

Average time spent:

Full rollout:

Within 5 months, we successfully onboarded ~6,500 airmen at 68 air maintenance units across 22 military bases, 2 branches of the US military, and the Royal Air Force.

Brenden Bice