All Work
DE-MSHORAD: Adapting a Complex Desktop Interface for Field Tablet Deployment
Northrop Grumman
2020
UX Designer
Competitive-sensitive: illustrative recreations only
Due to the competitive and proprietary nature of this work, screens and design artifacts cannot be shown. The visuals below are original illustrative recreations, built from scratch to demonstrate the type of interface problem I solved, not actual project screens.
Stryker combat vehicles at Fort Benning, Ga., September 2020, during training for the DE-MSHORAD program, the directed energy air defense system I designed operator interfaces for as part of Northrop Grumman's competing effort. Photo: U.S. Army photo by Patrick A. Albright (publicly released).
Domain
E-commerce
Year
2025
IA
Discovery
The Short Version
A complex, information-dense desktop C2 interface. Adapted for tablet deployment in field conditions: outdoor light, gloved hands, operators under stress. Every decision about information density affected touch usability. Every layout change affected how much operators could see at once.
My Role & Process
I was one of two UX designers on this effort, working across internal R&D prototyping and proposal support, designing a credible, operator-ready solution to demonstrate Northrop's capability to the Army. I owned interaction design and layout restructuring for the tablet adaptation. Northrop was not awarded the contract, which is a normal outcome in competitive defense procurement. I had limited but meaningful access to operators during this project, enough to understand their workflows and where the existing interface created the most friction. I used that input to prioritize: which elements were most critical during active operations, and which were secondary tasks that could be deprioritized or restructured without affecting operational readiness. From there the work was iterative: balancing touch target sizing, information density, and visual hierarchy against the technical constraints of the platform. The field-condition constraints pushed decisions I wouldn't have made otherwise: higher contrast thresholds, larger touch targets than standard guidelines recommend, and layout choices that assumed the operator might not be looking directly at the screen when they reached for it.
Desktop to Tablet: Restructuring for Touch
An illustrative recreation showing the type of restructuring involved: a dense reference structure standing in for a much longer, harder-to-scan desktop table, reorganized on tablet to surface only what's operationally critical. Field-condition constraints drove decisions I wouldn't have made otherwise: higher contrast thresholds, larger touch targets than standard guidelines recommend, and layout choices built for gloved hands and outdoor glare.
Desktop: dense, multi-zone reference structure
Tablet: Restructured for touch, Most critical tracks surfaced
What I Learned
Working in a classified, requirements-driven environment sharpened a specific skill: communicating design in terms of risk, not aesthetics. When your audience is systems engineers and program managers, "this is clearer" doesn't land; "this reduces operator error in a degraded-comms scenario" does. That translation skill has changed how I advocate for design decisions in any environment.