Wargaming Initiative for NATO ’22 – WIN 22

USING VR TO IMPROVE MILITARY TACTICAL PLANNING

Balancing the value of different features both for the user and the stakeholders became extremely important. However, this is what made the project a huge success!

Throughout this project, many key factors changed constantly including; stakeholder involvement, supplied resources, and our timeline. These changes required our team to adjust the project scope often. While keeping our design and user experience synced with our goal of making a VR game.

Problem?

Justify the value of using VR and digital resources to improve tactical and cognitive training for NATO soldiers with digital wargaming vs, physical wargaming.

Solution

Our goal was to turn the board game "Urben Offensive" into a digital VR game.

Tools

Adobe Suite, Gitlab
Jira, Figma, Miro
Blender, Google Sketch
Unity Game Engine
Microsoft VR
Fork, Plastic,

Team

1 Game Artist
1 UX Designer
1 Developer
1 Project Manager
2 Project Owners
1 Creative Director

My Role

UI/UX Design
User Research
Lots of Interviews
Level Design
Game Mechanics
Game Design
Demo Facilitator

Stakeholders

NATO ACT
NATO ACO
SHAPE
JFC's
SSC's
Innovation Hub
Student Training Center

Case Study Slide Deck

Our Creative Direction & Design Process

Interviews

As the creative director leading this war gaming project, our team facilitated & conducted user interviews with over 20 military professionals and 10 subject matter experts. This was crucial for understanding user's needs, preferences, and expectations to show the maximum value this project could provide in training situations. We used this information to create personas, and user stories based on the roles surrounding this type of training. After 1 week of communication with users, and stakeholders, our team sorted and analyzed the data gathered to create a user journey. We referenced this analyzed data, throughout the entire design process, which allowed us to take an iterative approach when implementing features.

The major objectives we wanted to achieve were;
- 5 key user types with personas?
- What training and information do those users need to improve their cognitive decision-making skills?
- How is this training currently facilitated and tracked?
We gained insight regarding the demonstration resources and audience.
We used our findings to decide what software and equipment should be used.

Surveys

After the project kickoff, we defined our research strategy and objectives. Understanding the target audience and their challenges was our priority. First, we built an online survey and shared it in various relevant communities. In just a few days, we received 18 submissions. Based on these, we identified 5 common pain points, which led us to the next step.

Personas

We wanted to form a deeper understanding of our users' goals, needs, experiences, and behaviors. So, we created 4 personas for each of our key user segments. They were based on user interviews and surveys, and we kept updating them throughout the project as we gathered more data. We used these personas whenever we wanted to step out of ourselves and reconsider our initial ideas.

Usability Testing

I created a fully functional, high-fidelity prototype/ demo of the game project-level areas and user flows mapped out in Unity. At the same time, one of our project managers started recruiting subjects for the test who fit our criteria. We did 4 usability tests in the first round and 20 more with contained iterating on the issues that we’ve identified:

Findings 01

Users seemed to have trouble viewing models on different devices.

solution 01

We created a game demo launcher to restrict device settings.

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