top of page

Design Tips for Secure Environments

  • Writer: Curtis Blair
    Curtis Blair
  • Sep 16, 2025
  • 2 min read

Helpful tips for supplementing your design process while adjusting to the intricate and nuances of DoD environments.


Project Discovery

Start with the current state, not what should be.

  • What is the status quo, where do they want to be, what is needed to build/ mitigate future states?


Set Expectations

You will never have a full budget, enough time, required resources, or consensus.

  • Set expectations, what can be done in the given timeframe and known constraints?


Explore Constraints

Roadmaps and timelines are useful, if flexible with project progress and fluctuations.

  • Ask about the proposed timeframes and milestone dates. What happens if they are missed?

  • What expectations are considered required, nice to have, or future requests?

  • Who can you collaborate with or request assistance from for domain knowledge?


Business Speak

  • Forced positivity is real and obscures accurate impressions of experiences and obstacles

  • Understand stakeholder expectations, measured metrics, goals, and terminology (there are so many acronyms).

  • Requirements generally refer to stakeholder requested features and functions, reframe and align with actual user and task needs


Reframe Research

UX Research is asking questions, it is admitting we don’t know, so we are finding out.

  • Research is often limited, push for quick sessions and build a continuous research practice

  • Review prior efforts to clarify the problem space and what has already been accomplished/ tried

  • Iteration and testing is only valuable if it is actually done and then improves task optimization


Interviews/ Subject Matter Experts

  • Triangulating interviews helps overcome tendency of people describing solutions and not problems

  • People always know when something isn’t working and build workarounds — utilize their workarounds to bridge knowledge gaps

  • Adjacent experiences are valuable if they are recent, past perspectives are useful for general knowledge building


Facilitation and Workshops

A great way to explore a problem, reach consensus, and formulate action plans.

  • Require civilian attire, it helps the group to share thoughts and opinions

  • Break challenges into small clear steps, post activity instructions

  • Determine what data the workshop will produce, and how it will be utilized


Project Status Updates

Status updates should be brief, simple, and cover three topics.

  • What you accomplished and why it progressed the project forward

  • Any identified obstacles and potential mitigation efforts

  • What you are doing next and why it is useful to the project

Excel Report

At least one stakeholder is going to want a report create in Excel.

Excel Template: Summary Table based on STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result)

  • Headings: Problem/Issue, Proposed Solution, Expected Result, Actual Result

  • What was the problem? What was done to alleviate issue, What was expected to happen, What happened and lessons learned?


Intuitive Designs

Intuitive designs are based on iteration, usability testing, and task optimization.

  • Intuitive is doing something once and learning the pattern

  • Providing context improve comprehension and is the key to feeling intuitive

  • Innovation comes from finding problems that require low effort, small changes, and produce system-level impact





bottom of page