Problem
Senior Target Network Digital Analysts (TDNAs) face significant cognitive and operational burdens when simultaneously managing team workflows, maintaining oversight of active investigations,and ensuring analytic integrity standards are upheld across the team. Context-switching across multiple disconnected tools requires analyststo manually locate, copy, and reconcile findings from disparate systems, reports, and shared files making multi-source data synthesis a time-intensive and error-prone process.
Discovered Painpoints
Scenario
Scenario:
User Interviews
A comprehensive set of user interviews are taken with both senior and junior target network analysts.
The first few interviews gave us the surface Idea of the TDNA workflow, which resulted in incomplete understanding.
Discovered Painpoints
Discovered Painpoints
Low Fidelity Ideation
We found opportunities in creating task assignment, AI-querying,Monitoring Data Visualization and reporting/auditing section features differently on two different versions. These Ideas were developed to the Mid-Fidelity level to show the stakeholders
Information Heirarchy
We found opportunities in creating task assignment, AI-querying,Monitoring Data Visualization and reporting/auditing section features differently on two different versions. These Ideas were developed to the Mid-Fidelity level to show the stakeholders
Stakeholder Feedback:
Stakeholders emphasized the critical need to embed guardrails and tiered access controls directly within the system ensuring junior TDNAs operate within sanctioned boundaries while safeguarding civilian data in full compliance with data protection regulations.
Features:
Features:
Stakeholder Feedback:
Stakeholders emphasized the critical need to embed guardrails and tiered access controls directly within the system ensuring junior TDNAs operate within sanctioned boundaries while safeguarding civilian data in full compliance with data protection regulations.
Demo Video
Goal Setting
AI learns from the Senior TDNA's input to further optimize queries and identify outliers.
Implement AI-driven suggestions for datasets to initiate the query process, with flexibility
for TDNAs to incorporate their own preferences.
Query Building
AI-assisted querying enables TDNAs without programming expertise to search datasets by time, location, and date with mandatory justification logged against every query to protect civilian privacy.
SPINE
A repository that documents analyst’s investigative journey sequentially.It can be accessed by all team members at any point of the day via “Spine” icon in the upper right corner of the window.
Learning Outcomes
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Deliberately empathetic questions like "where does your day feel like it works against you?" unlocked authentic pain points through roleplaying and white-boarding alone.
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The greatest threat to analytical quality is not the absence of tools, but the compounding cost of switching between them without structure. Effective design must sequence tasks deliberately preserving focus and preventing cognitive surrender.
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Unstructured tool-switching is the fastest path to cognitive surrender. Deliberate task sequencing is what keeps analytical quality intact.
