Case Study

Mission Threads

Overview

During my time at Peraton, I worked with a small team to transform the company's fragmented knowledge base, consolidating thousands of critical internal documents spread across multiple heritage companies.

Employees relied on this system for government contract applications and daily operations, yet it was difficult to search and maintain. Our goal was to create a structured, intuitive system that simplified access and encouraged engagement.

Tools & Roles

UX/UI Design, User Research, Usability Testing, Product Strategy

  • Figma

Background

Peraton's rapid growth through acquisitions makes maintaining an up-to-date database challenging. Information is often missing, outdated, or lacks proper points of contact. Employees frequently keep documents on personal devices or share them informally, and uploaded files are often unsearchable.

The existing knowledge base was a disorganized collection of thousands of documents, making it difficult to find or update information. Our goal was to build a system that allows employees to easily access and contribute valuable knowledge.

Information Gathering

User Interviews

We conducted user interviews to understand how employees interacted with the current system and what improvements they needed. Key pain points included:

"Information is siloed. I know my work, but I have no visibility into what others are doing."

Director

"Finding resources and contacts is frustrating—there’s no clear way to navigate the system."

General Manager

"The system is underutilized. If no one’s using it, why should I bother updating it?"

Senior Program Director

"Duplicated efforts are common. Everyone keeps their own documents, leading to inefficiencies."

Senior Systems Architect

Key Insights

We conducted user interviews with employees at Peraton to gather insights on their experiences with the existing knowledge base. The feedback highlighted several key issues:

  • The knowledge base was difficult to navigate and search, leading to frustration and inefficiency.
  • Employees were less motivated to update the knowledge base because they felt it was underutilized.
  • Information was often siloed, making it hard to get a comprehensive view of the company's knowledge.
  • It was difficult to quickly identify relevant documents from search results and then pull out relevant info from them.
  • There was a need for a more user-friendly interface and better search functionality.

Requirements Brainstorming

We took the information we gathered from our interviews and conversations with stakeholders and started to brainstorm requirements for the new system.

Personas & Features

Based on the information gathered from our interviews, we created the following personas.

This further helped us to create a potential list of features, which we would later refine through more interviews and feedback. It included:

  • Industry trends - Customized per user
  • Recent content
  • Search bar
  • Filters
  • Contribute Info Button
  • Upload Documents Page
  • Search Results Page
    • Breadcrumbs
    • Displays results of a search/filter
    • See how old/new each item is
    • Report & request missing information button
  • Individual Search Result
    • Author, date, title, brief description, accuracy rating
    • Document tags
  • Mission Threads Document Page
    • Breadcrumbs
    • Core nodes
    • Author, date, title, brief description, accuracy rating
    • Report & request missing information button
    • Tags for heritage companies

Prototypes

From there, we boiled down our features list to just a few items that we wanted to focus on and created a prototype to present to our stakeholders.

Showcased Features:

  • Search dropdown for more nuances searches
  • Filter by date range
  • Feedback and copy buttons
  • Content pagination
  • View counter

We also explored AI-enabled ideas to see what a far-future version of the system could look like. We modeled it after ChatGPT's UI and AI search result UIs from browsers like Brave. This kind of system would sit next to the new proposed UI as a separate feature and would allow users to quickly search for specific points of interest across multiple documents.

Project Reflection

Our redesign transformed Peraton’s outdated knowledge base into an intuitive, searchable system with improved document organization and discoverability.

However, key challenges emerged that offer opportunities for further refinement:

  1. Driving Adoption: Despite improved usability, some employees hesitated to contribute. Future iterations could incorporate onboarding tutorials and incentives to encourage participation.
  2. Iterative Testing: Additional user testing throughout development would have surfaced pain points earlier. A phased rollout with real-time analytics could provide continuous feedback.
  3. Search Optimization: Inconsistent metadata made finding specific documents challenging. AI-driven tagging and metadata standardization could improve search accuracy.