Hjemmeværnet App

In June 2016 Hjemmeværnet (the Danish Home Guard) held its biggest exercise in recent years: Landsøvelsen 2016 (the National Drill 2016). Over the course of three days more than 5.000 eager Home Guard Soldiers were summoned to the greater Fredericia area to practice various combat scenarios. An event of this scale required extensive coordination, which is why Hjemmeværnet was on the lookout for a versatile mobile solution for communicating to the voluntary soldiers before, during and after the exercise.

I made the initial sketches for the information architecture of the app by hand, which was a great tool for facilitating the team discussion about the overall structure of the app. When we had aligned internally I converted the hand-drawn sketches to artboards in sketch which were then stitched to an interactive prototype in InVision. This was remotely shared with the client who shared it in the organization to receive feedback at this stage. When the feedback was received and the corresponding changes implemented the concept went on to graphic design and development. This iterative process based on sketching and prototyping made sure everyone was aligned early in the project and assured all stakeholders that we could deliver a product which served both organisational goals and user needs.

The final app served to function as a digital toolbox within which the volunteers could easily find important information about the national exercise before, during and after the event. Besides providing real-time news from Hjemmeværnet’s communication control panel it gave a quick overview of the upcoming events, important points of interest, the guidelines for the exercise and answered frequently asked questions.

To properly round off the project me and a colleague decided to join the action on the busiest day of the exercise. We saw it as a great opportunity to do some qualitative research and user testing the app in practice with the actual target group. Our trip was documented on video and the findings from from the qualitative data lead to an extended collaboration with Hjemmeværnet to design and develop an updated version of the app.