3.5 years designing mission-critical software for the US Navy and Air Force — embedded within a cross-organizational team of designers and researchers from MITRE and Northrop Grumman.
LUXCE — the Lean UX Center of Excellence — was a cross-organizational design team embedded within a defense software program on behalf of the US Navy. Designers and researchers from Monterey Technologies (MTI), MITRE, and Northrop Grumman worked side by side within this team.
As a UX Designer II at MTI, I was embedded within LUXCE for 3.5 years — contributing to multiple concurrent programs spanning mission planning software, debriefing tools, weapons planning systems, and research initiatives. Each project operated within the constraints of classified environments, pre-deployment software, and multi-stakeholder organizational complexity.
Separately, MTI also deployed me directly on two client engagements — with the US Navy on LCAC debriefing software and with Boeing's in-house Tapestry development team.
"Every design decision in this environment had to account for real operational constraints — classified facilities, pre-deployment software, users who are among the most expert in the world, and organizational complexity spanning three companies."
Defense technology contractor based in Park City, Utah. MTI contributed UX designers — including me — to the LUXCE team, and separately engaged me on direct client work with the Navy and Boeing.
Federally funded research and development center. MITRE contributed researchers and subject matter experts to the LUXCE team — particularly on research methodology and systems engineering.
Prime contractor on the Navy program. Northrop contributed designers and served as the organizational bridge between LUXCE and the government client — the US Navy.
The Navy's mission planning software was over a decade out of date. The Air Force needed to unify with them. The goal was ambitious: design a single Unified Planner that could serve both branches without stripping away the context-specific workflows each depended on.
The first and most critical challenge was navigation. Planners needed to move fluidly between missions, sub-plans, and map views simultaneously. The legacy systems forced them to navigate away from the map to access plan details — fragmenting the very workflow that required the most cognitive continuity.
I worked across information architecture, UI component design, and prototyping — contributing to the navigation drawer system, defining interaction states for a new navigational paradigm, and building clickable prototypes used in User Advisory Group sessions with active duty pilots.
Operating as a focused sub-team within LUXCE, the Tiger Team was tasked with researching and designing a standalone, airwing-specific planning environment — a scoped alternative to the full Unified Planner.
The insight driving this work: the Unified Planner's breadth created cognitive overhead for planners who only needed to coordinate within their own airwing. A streamlined environment purpose-built for that context could dramatically reduce friction for the majority of everyday mission planning tasks.
This work fed directly into SBIR program proposals and informed the strategic conversation about when the Unified Planner should — and shouldn't — be the default tool.
A Small Business Innovation Research initiative exploring a sandbox planning environment scoped to individual airwings — allowing planners to work within a focused context without the organizational complexity of the full Unified Planner.
This SBIR program extended the Tiger Team's conceptual work into a more formal research and design track, exploring what a right-sized planning tool would look like for teams who needed speed and simplicity over the full system's breadth.
A second SBIR initiative focused on a different problem: capturing real-time behavioral data from users of the Unified Planner to give designers, researchers, and administrators visibility into how the product was actually being used.
In a pre-deployment defense software environment where behavioral analytics aren't standard, this tool represented a meaningful step toward evidence-based product iteration. The design work focused on making complex usage data legible and actionable for non-technical stakeholders.
Separately from my LUXCE embedded work, MTI deployed me as their UX designer on two direct client engagements — bringing the same design discipline to different operational domains.
LCAC crews needed a better way to review and learn from their missions after the fact. The existing process was manual and fragmented — crews couldn't easily visualize what had happened or correlate their craft's track with time and operational data.
I designed a map-based visual analytics tool that allowed crews to load mission data and see their full track played back in context — where the craft was, when, and how that correlated with other operational variables. The goal was to compress the post-mission review process and surface insights that were previously buried in raw data.
I partnered with Boeing's in-house Tapestry development team on two concurrent products. The first was a redesign of their Weapon Planning Software (WPS) — an existing tool used by planners to manage weapons selection and planning workflows.
The second was the conception and design of a new Network Planning Tool — a weapons selection interface that helped users determine the correct weapon based on multiple operational variables including network plans, targets, and threat assessments. This was a zero-to-one design problem requiring close collaboration with Boeing's engineers and subject matter experts.
As part of the Unified Planner program, LUXCE conducted scheduled User Advisory Group sessions with active duty pilots throughout the year. I attended and led an independent session at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach — a closed-facility research event with 13 active duty F-15, F-22, and E-2 pilots alongside intelligence officers.
The session tested discoverability — not whether users could operate the software, but whether they could find what they needed under realistic planning pressure. The findings directly informed Q1 design priorities, including a full timeline redesign and a dedicated map inconsistency task force.
The full research case study documents the session methodology, observational findings, verbatim pilot quotes, and what 13 of the most highly trained operators in the world told us about software friction.
Read the full research case study →Embedded design work in a defense context is different from any other environment I could have started in. The stakes are real, the users are expert, and the organizational complexity is constant. Getting work in front of users requires navigating security protocols, multi-stakeholder sign-off, and facilities that don't allow recording devices.
That constraint-heavy environment taught me to be a more disciplined researcher and a more intentional designer. When you can't rely on analytics or A/B tests, you have to make your in-person research count. Every UAG session, every debrief, every pilot's offhand comment is data you can't get back.
Working across MTI, MITRE, and Northrop Grumman also taught me that good design in a multi-organization environment is as much about communication, alignment, and trust-building as it is about the work itself. People have to believe in what you're doing before they'll act on what you find.