As a UX designer, I have been given the opportunity to work on quite a few amazing solutions. But one solution in particular stands out to me: My time designing user experiences for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft (see my portfolio case here).
In this article I have decided to share my personal story of how I became a UX designer on the F-35 aircraft platform. You will be able to read what is was like, the ups and the downs, the good and the bad, and what I specifically worked on.
My hope and purpose for this article is that this story might inspire other designers and digital professionals to work in mission critical areas – such as military, intelligence and law enforcement, or to just provide you with a glimpse into a rare area of user experience design.
The information in this article has been de-classified and suitable for public consumption.
How I became a UX designer on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
My personal story of working on the F-35 started outside the military domain: In the mid 2000s, I was working as a UX designer on business critical experiences for Wall Street Systems (now iON) in southern France. UX for trader software, basically. I lived in Nice, but being a Danish national I was reading up on Danish news media every day.
One day I learned the important news story that my small, native country of Denmark had been chosen as a partnering country for the F-35 program. A few select danish companies would get contracts to help build the F-35 (in related news, Turkey has officially been kicked out of the program – probably a very wise decision).
Above: The flags of the 9 original partnering countries are printed on the side of some F-35s. 🇳🇴🇩🇰🇦🇺🇨🇦🇹🇷🇳🇱🇮🇹🇬🇧🇺🇸 (Source: Lockheed)
The boyhood dream I didn’t know I had
One of the companies selected for contracts on the F-35 was a Danish software company called Systematic. Systematic is still the largest privately owned software company in Denmark, supplying solutions for Healthcare EMR, Military systems, National Intelligence and other mission critical systems for both the public and private sector. They supply multiple solutions for NATO, including situation awareness systems for the American military and many other partnering countries. On the F-35, a specific team in Systematic would be working on subcontracts for Lockheed Martin. And this company was located in my home city of Aarhus, Denmark.
I realized … If ever would get a chance to work on something unique – designing UX for a jetfighter – this could be it.
But how to get a UX foot in the door to a project like that?
Getting a job on the F-35 development team
Being determined to work on the project of my dreams, I came up with a strategy of how to get a job within the Danish software company that had contracts on the F-35.
Through various means (and what I believed at the time was a coincidence) I got in touch with a company executive. We did a meet-and-greet, that evolved on-the-spot into an actual job interview, and I was offered a contract before I left that day. I soon moved back to Denmark to start working in that company as a UX designer. I didn’t initially join the F-35 project, but started working on something different.
On a side note, at the time, “UX” (for “user experience”) was not really coined as an official work title in the company. I was a “systems engineer” on my business card, working on “UE”. I asked them to change the abbreviation companywide to “UX”. It took time to change the business cards, but now that company has a large team of experienced UX designers that work on many areas of digital defence systems.
I ended up working there for almost 8 years.
A golden opportunity
I was not originally assigned to the F-35 team, but an opportunity came up where the local F-35 development team needed some ideas and illustrations for a presentation. It was to be shared with Lockheed Martin over-seas. They were designing some sort of alert priority system, and I used principles from a cockpit warning system (ICAWS), which layers warnings depending on urgency, as as basis for some digital UI sketches that layered warnings by groups and priority. Apparently, I supplied them with something useful. I was asked to join the team.
I was now a UX designer on a development team subcontracting to the immense F-35 development program.
Getting introduced to the F-35 production program in Fort Worth, Texas
How big is the F-35 program? How many people are involved? I won’t bore you with the numbers. Let me say it this way: The F-35 airplane is probably the most complex thing ever made on a production line.
Above: The F-35 Moving Line and Forward Fuselage Assembly Area in the Fort Worth production plant. Software development and UX design was in adjacent buildings, elsewhere and abroad. (Source: Ralph Heath Monorail images)
Want to know more? There’s plenty of good info about the F-35 program, the aircraft and its production. I won’t go into that here, as there is too much to tell.
When I joined as a UX designer, the F-35 was early in what is called low rate initial production (LRIP) stage.
I was soon dispatched to Fort Worth Texas, where I worked subcontracting for Lockheed Martin Auronautics inside the largest aircontioned building in the world. This is where Lockheed builds F-35, the F-22 and used to build the F-16 (when F-16 production was peaking, they churned out about 1 fighter per day here).
Above: The Fort Worth production plant is seen in the background as the very first production line F-35 takes off for its inaugural flight in 2011. (Lockheed Martin photo by David Drais)
My role as a UX designer was to work on various software systems that would carry from prototypes into low-rate initial production and then actual line production and fleet sustainment.
Designing UX for F-35 systems
The software development team worked on multiple tracks. Some tracks were protocol related and had no UI whatsoever. Other tracks was related to F-35 users and their related interactive systems. I joined a large team of specialists working on various areas of digital systems for the F-35.
One specific UI for the F-35, the glass-only aviation cockpit display, also called the “Panoramic Display”. It mainly consists of a context-aware touch-screen system in grids of 3. This screen real-estate management solution allows instant view but in-flight customization of 12 displays on a single screen. (Lockheed Simulator, source: Youtube)
Visual touch feedback patterns on the F-35 Panoramic Display (Royal Danish Airforce, source: Youtube)
The panoramic display integrates into the overall pilot experience, that also includes advanced technologies like augmented reality in the helmet mounted display (HMDS) and cockpit features like speech recognition (DVI).
Above: The F-35 cockpit
Other digital solutions to the F-35 includes off-board mission support systems, planning systems, maintenance, diagnostics, aircraft servicing and parts ordering.
F-35 digital user interface systems also includes off-board systems like mission planning, maintenance systems and more. (Picture: ALIS)
Working with pilots, maintainers, planners, engineers, developers and human factor specialists
Working on the F-35 meant collaborating with a complex landscape of stakeholders.
I was assigned to work in the digital systems development area that included aviation engineering employees and domain experts. I also had a few UX colleagues. They were more experienced in the area of Human Factors and had impressive stories to tell about designing for the world of military aviation. One of them, for instance, did the voice design and voice strategy for helicopters.
Myself, I came with a digital user experience design background and had my experience there, still with my background of designing for highly specialized users. I didn’t know much about aviation and the learning curve was steep. Simulators help! But the mix of domain knowledge and human factors considerations with the digital experience design input needed for a next generation aviation experience proved valuable.
Apart from that, I basically did what any UX designers do elsewhere; work with users, developers and a wide array of stakeholders. In my case, getting access to actual end users proved quite difficult in a large military production setup. In some cases, this prompted the employment of other methods from the UX toolbox to progress and achieve the best possible understanding of user needs. In other solutions, many of the digital user interfaces had a high degree of direct end user involvement and often cooperative design processes were involved, even though they weren’t called anything of that sort. I learned that design can be design even when it isn’t called design.
Getting UX recognized as something that … matters
The role of a UX designer was not really that well-known inside the F-35 program.
I soon learned something important when working on a big production program. UX was not really considered that big of a deal. A challenge was getting UX recognized as a mission critical requirement factor, not just something to check off of a list.
I have worked in many “nerdy” and knowledge-heavy environments, but this one topped the list. Still, I encountered great openness towards my input regarding the design of the user experience for system platform like the F-35. It is my experience that being permanently on deck as a designer with other stakeholders is important and the only way to make design really work in these types of settings. Design is not just something you apply to a product, it is the product.
But I did encounter the difficulties of being a foreign national and the limitations that brings. It makes sense, though, and I’m in no way complaining about this. F-35 technology is extremely advanced and needs to be protected. This technology mustn’t come into the wrong hands.
But it also gave rise to many funny situations, being constantly escorted to the water cooler.
User Interface Specifications for the F-35
One of the major accomplishments to the program that we did as UX designers was supplying a new template to the requirement workflow and specification process in general: A “User Interface Specification” template, or the UIS.
A user interface specification makes it possible to communicate the intentions, design and interactivity of a user interface design for common alignment between users, engineers, designers and other stakeholders.
It soon became a recognized document type when specifying user experiences for F-35 digital solutions. I do not know if this is still in use today, but hopefully!
Design work on the F-35
The overall main purpose of UX design for the F-35 was to support the user in completing the mission successfully.
I was primarly involved with designing UIs and features for specific user interfaces (embedded and detached) to different F-35 users on its roster. As a foreign national, I was not able to work directly on certain parts of the aircraft experience, but worked mainly on off-board planning, maintenance and mission support systems, including the much-critiqued but also highly capable ALIS system, which is still the backbone of F-35 fleet management. One tool in particular I worked on more or less from scratch was a portable diagnostics tool plugging into the fuselage.
With a wide array of digital systems in play, there was a large number of independent systems with little or no experiential coherence. One important and dauting task was bridging the experience design of many digital platforms and solutions that different F-35 users groups will encounter.
Can a designer really make a difference in a setup like that?
I’m often asked if a single UX designer could ever make a real change in a massive setup like the F-35 program.
I would respond that being in a complex military production setup is not exactly the dream position for a UX designer, if one has a heart to change everything in two weeks and being the office “unicorn”. Luckily, that’s not what UX is about. And the F-35 isn’t exactly working like a small startup where all suddenly go agile and build-measure-learn from day 1. It takes a lot of patience to get a single pixel moved in the right direction and to gently shift development processes to being more user-centric. It also meant advocating the value of purposeful design and sound heuristics into everyday discussions about the right solutions.
My personal experience is that it takes a long term push for change in the right direction for UX design in the mission critical arena, but the end reward is that much more fulfilling, especially when you are later told it helped save lives.
Final words
Having worked as a UX designer on the F-35 has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I would absolutely do it again if I could, and I feel blessed by the opportunity.
Bringing user experience considerations into the work of men and women in the military, national intelligence and law enforcement is for me one of the best way to make a positive difference as a designer.
If you should have a dream to work in this areas of design, I would say it is both highly needed and very well worth it. So go for it – and let good design make a difference!
Mikkel Michelsen
February 5th, 2021.