Arachne: A Novel User Research Application for Enterprise Application Development

Nearly all technology companies embrace and incorporate user feedback and validation into their research and development (R&D), to remain relevant in the digital world, the Air Force needs to adopt this significant trend towards user centric R&D. The problem is much of this user feedback is acquired inconsistently, with varying levels of quality, and in unstructured formats – interview transcripts or videos, interview notes, qualitative survey answers, observations, and such. This creates a significant challenge for companies to acquire user data that is accurate and dependable, in formats that are able to be shared and searched by multiple teams – at scale. Limited access to users exacerbates this issue, with precious time wasted asking similar questions and poor research techniques making true insights difficult to glean. Rocket Communications (“Rocket”) is developing a commercial solution for this unmet need, which will help designers/developers build better research plans, aid in collection of user data, act as a central, collective repository for all of this research, and provide analytical tools that create actionable insights that can be used across the company. This will not only help with new product development, but can improve training, product usability, customer service, and more. While Rocket is initially developing this tool for internal use, they intend to license it for client use, as a more robust, lower cost, and simpler-to-use alternative to the incomplete tools available today. They call this tool “Arachne.”  In addition to commercial prospects for a solution like this, Rocket has validated that there is a need for an adapted version of Arachne in the DoD. Fast growing software factories such as the Kobayashi Maru initiative within the Enterprise Cross Mission Ground organization at SMC are working to solve operational problems with user-centric, in-house development programs. These teams, however, face the same user engagement problems as commercial developers, perhaps even more so due to the challenges of working in classified environments. Multiple teams need access to the same overworked operators and frequently ask similar questions; less-experienced teams are untrained on user research; and research that is obtained is generally not turned into actionable insights to be leveraged across teams. Utilizing Arachne for user research data gathering will empower our warfighters with better designed software based on actual user engagement which will improve efficiency in training and usage (saving both time and money). Additionally, Arachne will improve user data accuracy through intuitive research workflows and will enable better manpower utilization by allowing user research to be shared across the organization instead of siloed and used only by the team acquiring the data.