Reinventing the traditional military information portal

Summary

The challenge

The United States Space Force is the U.S. military’s newest branch, created to protect American interests in space. With more than 15,000 Guardians and growing, the organization lacked a central place to share announcements, resources, and the information service members need to do their jobs.

In the absence of a portal, Guardians relied on easily missed emails and newsletters to learn what was happening across the service. Day-to-day work required jumping between disjointed tools — milConnect for health insurance, the BAH calculator for housing — with no single front door. Remembering which tool to use, and where to find it, was its own job.

To coincide with its one-year anniversary, USSF set out to close the gap by partnering with Skylight and Alaska Northstar Resources to build a modern portal. The team gave itself eight weeks: a live site by January 1, 2021.

The solution

We partnered with Space Force leadership to design and ship a minimum viable product (MVP) within the eight-week window.

Even with the deadline, we made room for user research. We interviewed Guardians and high-ranking officials — including a four-star general — to learn what each audience actually needed from a portal, not just at the rank-and-file level but at command levels too. That research shaped both content priorities and design decisions.

Rather than dumping links onto the page, we picked the content the portal needed most: announcements, human resources information, and career opportunities. Borrowing patterns from the U.S. Web Design System let us assemble a clean, accessible interface fast, without reinventing components for navigation, layout, or forms. The restraint paid off in usability testing:

I don’t like most military pages, tiny hyperlinks because the page is so full. This is different to what I’m used to seeing, for ease of use, the cleanliness is nice. This is the cleanest thing I’ve seen.

We also used the project to model an agile, user-centered way of working for the Space Force. A portal is software, not a satellite — it doesn’t have to be perfect at launch, and it’s never really done. We showed USSF how to ship a viable product, gather feedback, and iterate, building software collaboratively with users rather than handing it to them as a finished thing.

Coinciding with USSF’s one-year anniversary, the launch marked a new approach to digital for the service — modern, human-centered, and accessible from day one.

The results

• Shipped a working portal in eight weeks, in time for USSF’s one-year anniversary on January 1, 2021
• Replaced a scatter of emails, newsletters, and disjointed apps with a single, accessible front door for more than 15,000 Guardians
• Anchored the design in the U.S. Web Design System, giving Space Force an accessible, mobile-friendly foundation it could extend without starting over
• Modeled an agile, user-centered way of working that USSF could carry forward beyond the MVP, validated by positive feedback from service members and leadership