Building design capability to modernize Air Force weather systems
Summary
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) Weather Systems Program Office (WxPO) is transitioning its weather applications to the cloud. We partnered with the Weather Applications Rapid Production/Prototype (WARPspeed) group — which builds and modernizes those applications — to scale human-centered design (HCD) practices while the organization migrated and modernized its portfolio.
The challenge
WxPO’s mission is to enable weather and environmental operations across the Department of Defense (DoD) and beyond. DoD meteorologists, air traffic controllers, pilots, the intelligence community, and civilian forecasters rely on WxPO’s applications and data to predict weather patterns, produce forecasts, and communicate critical weather information. That work demands modern user experiences delivered with speed, consistency, and quality.
In 2017, WxPO launched an effort to migrate more than 75 applications and services to the cloud. The goal was to complete the migration, deprecate on-prem servers, and deliver a single user interface — called BIFROST — for all applications and services by 2025. Alongside the benefits of operating in a cloud environment (like scalability), the transition created an opportunity — and a need — to rethink how users experience WxPO’s tools end to end.
To manage this shift, WxPO established a software factory, WARPspeed. Early on, WARPspeed didn’t have the design capacity or infrastructure to deliver the modern, user-centered products WxPO envisioned. With one designer supporting six teams, design couldn’t keep pace with development cycles. Mockups were often created in outdated tools (like PowerPoint), which put extra burden on developers to interpret intent, slowed delivery, and contributed to growing design debt.
WARPspeed teams also operated in silos. Unreliable communication and a lack of shared workflows led to rework, missed dependencies, and inconsistent user experiences across applications.
The solution
Building on our success in accelerating WxPO’s cloud migration through service design, WARPspeed engaged us to help build the internal design capabilities needed to deliver better user experiences across its portfolio of weather applications.
We implemented a “player-coach” model — embedding our experts within WARPspeed delivery teams while building organization-wide capacity in user research, product design, content design, and agile product management. This approach let us improve real products in flight while strengthening the practices, operations, and infrastructure that make high-quality delivery repeatable.
Our work included:
- Building HCD skills across the delivery lifecycle by pairing with staff members on multiple WARPspeed teams (including BIFROST and Environmental Workflow Application)
- Introducing shared design and product practices through an HCD Playbook, lunch-and-learns, and a series of “Tip Tuesday” lessons
- Scaling design consistency by developing a WxPO design system, supporting a design community of practice, and teaching core skills like prototyping and user research
- Upgrading and streamlining tool usage by recommending organization-level tooling standards, training designers and developers on Figma, cleaning up Confluence spaces, and onboarding more staff to Jira
- Improving delivery structures and routines by strengthening backlog management, clarifying product manager and requirements manager roles and responsibilities, and recommending improvements for integrated software testing
- Supporting leadership alignment with org-level recommendations to improve cross-team collaboration, including workshops to map dependencies, introducing a strategy and integration role at the WARPspeed level, and facilitating new product management activities
Together, these efforts improved both the quality of application experiences and the reliability of how WARPspeed teams deliver them — helping WxPO better support critical weather operations across its user community.
I’ve been in this business for a while, and this is the first time I’ve seen people advocating for users at this level, and also seeing stakeholders buy-in. We’re headed in the right direction and our users are seeing that.
WxPO Leadership
The results
- Strengthened HCD and agile product management capabilities within three WARPspeed teams, confirmed through a comprehensive maturity assessment
- Introduced and trained staff on modern design tools (including Figma), improving user testing and reducing design and technical debt
- Improved backlog management by writing more detailed stories that developers can implement more easily, increasing ticket status visibility across teams, and bringing user needs to the forefront
- Supported culture change by reinforcing user advocacy, improving how teams receive and respond to user feedback, and emphasizing research early and often
- Accelerated delivery by increasing cross-team collaboration and integration, identifying dependencies earlier, and fostering stronger timeline alignment