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Heuristic Audit of Top Secret Intelligence Portal
Dates:
April 2025-June 2025
Role:
UX Design Lead
Team Composition:
2 Design Leads
1 Project Manager
3 Managing Directors (Sales)
Project type:
Self-Service Portal Audit
Overview:
The US government contracted us to conduct a UX heuristic audit of a deployed self-service portal for a Top Secret intelligence agency.
The Challenge:
A recently deployed self-service portal was facing low adoption rates due to a number of factors and our team was brought on to identify points of improvement and recommend a tiered roadmap approach to ideate development.
My Role:
As a Platform Experience Lead with a clearance my main role was to conduct an onsite audit of the current deployment of the self-service portal and work with my team to recommend improvements to the UX with a goal to improve user adoption.
Approach:
• Conduct an onsite analysis of another vendor and the current state of the portal and the supporting call center. As the site was classified, my classification status was invaluable to our role on this project.
• Our team used these findings to conduct several workshops to better understand user groups and their actions within the system environments. One of our struggles was access to users due to the nature of the top-secret classification on the platform. We were instead given access to leadership and technical users which also gave us more insight into the out-of-scope fulfillment portal.
• While the fulfillment portal was out-of-scope, we were presented with several sales opportunities that we would later present to our managing director leadership team.
• Our team took our findings from the workshops and used them to guide discussions of user actions with the vendor to better understand the system deployment and areas for improvement.
Outcomes:
• Identified several quick win improvements to push users to the service-portal.
• Outlined iterative improvements to the self-service portal over the next two years.
• Developed a working relationship and partnership with the vendor for future collaborations.
• Enabled managing director team for future sales opportunities by outlining and presenting out-of-scope opportunities.
Tools & Deliverables:
• HTML based clickable prototype
• High-Level executive briefing highlighting approach, findings, and recommendations.
• Detailed booklet outlining our findings and recommendations for development teams and future consultants.
Reflections:
This project gave a 8 weeks to complete and deliver this audit and with 2 design leads we overdelivered. Our managing directors called our research on future opportunities and our development of relationship with the vendor invaluable to the future relationship with our client (the bureau).
Connect with me:
Introducing the recent project by John Mariano, a two-month engagement where the US government assigned the task of auditing a deployed self-service portal to assess UX improvements and enhance adoption across the agency. This project exemplifies our commitment to delivering top-notch solutions that drive efficiency and user satisfaction in the digital landscape.
