Lead UI Designer on a team of 5, I played a crucial role in shaping the user experience through hands-on research, journey mapping, ideation, testing, and prototype development.
I was instrumental in creating the #1 U.S. Airlines (NDA) future pilot experience, improving coordination and quality of life for 30,000 employees. My research-driven approach resulted in a successful five-year $25 Million roadmap that aligned multiple departments and secured crucial stage 2 funding.
FINAL ASSET: Interaction Design: Contextual updates provide the right information at the right time.
FINAL ASSET: Pilot in-flight event timeline, providing contextual information at the right time.
Get your head out of your ‘Apps’.
The #1 U.S. Airline, delivers daily flight critical and employee information over 15 separate apps. This divided collection of information leads to impaired crew communication, lack of awareness, team frustrations & possible delays in takeoff.
Our Goals:
● Promote efficient decision making.
● Improve crew quality of life.
● Ensure business continuity.
Preflight events that lead to delays are caused by paper documents and phone calls.
Pilots 'hunt' through 14+ apps for flight critical information.
Meeting with decision level directors of flight and pilot technologies, engineers and design teams we delivered game-changing results in just 3 months by collaborating with key stakeholders and driving decision-making with research and agile project management.
We had over 40 participants in the project at all levels of experience and seniority participating in one-on-one user interviews, user testing and validation of our final deliverables.
On-site HQ cross functional workshops between Directors, Engineering & Design.
I conducted 30+ pilot interviews to understand day-to-day operations, communication, platform and awareness needs to understand all the parts of a pilots day-in-the-life.
Conducting interviews with pilots and stakeholders.
Conducting a current platform analysis.
How does a pilot find the information they need?
● I led the 2 person design team
● Conducted daily scrums
● Communicated directly with stakeholders
I conducted an on-site field study at DFW Airport to shadow pilots, uncovering key pain points in their workflow and improving critical information communication for flights.
Conducting a field study at Dallas-Fort Worth
What does a pilot do to get ready for a flight?
In the cockpit: How do you use the current toolset to get flight critical information?
Pilots helped break down a typical day, focusing on the goals they have for each part and using a grading scale we helped them create, This resulted in 5 separate Journey Maps.
We ran a solutions road map session with key director level stakeholders to align business goals with pilot needs identifying areas of opportunity, lists of capabilities and dependencies.
Conducting a Journey Map workshop
Solution Mapping: Deciding on priorities
● There was a need for direct communication and improved coordination for each flight crew with real-time feedback loops.
● The experience needs to have ‘contextual awareness’ to know who the user is and provide the right information at the right time.
● Pilots need information in small doses without digging through a bunch of screens.
● Pilots feel strongly about getting passengers to their destinations and feel the tech they have to navigate through gets in the way instead of supporting that mission.
5 journey maps representing all the parts of the pilots experience
The current pilot experience: entering employee info, schedule & location in 14+ separate apps to get information; Proposed: create an 'intelligent' contextual experience 'knows' the pilot & delivers the right information at the right time.
#1 U.S. Airlines’ divided collection of information leads to impaired crew communication, lack of awareness, team frustrations and possible delays in takeoff.
How might we leverage new technology that is contextually aware of the user, delivering the right information at the right time and intuitive enough to remember the user across devices in real-time, building reliable coordination, decreasing user friction and delays in service?
I used ‘Nielsen Norman 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design’ to conduct a heuristic UX evaluation of the current app. Using Severity Ratings to evaluate, I identified 50 pain points over 15 screens and supplied stakeholders with detailed reports to gather feature buy-in.
How might we improve Brightwheel’s messaging system so that it helps build trust, confidence, and accountability between educators and parents?
Must have core design values for our solution:
● Transparency: Who are the messages being sent to and coming from?
● Accountability: How confident are users that the messages are being received and/or read?
● Responsiveness: The system must inform users that an action was taken.
Problem: What do you build when the last thing your client wants is another app?
Answer: Embrace new and updated technology that delivers a better end to end experience for employees.
Directors told us that they did NOT want a new app and a goal of the airline was to move away from material design and towards a 100% Apple device ecosystem, this changed our thinking of possible solutions.
We developed a story for our user persona: 'Captain Dave’, that followed him on a two day flight taking him from his home, overnight and back again.
‘Captain Dave’s’ tools delivered ‘small pieces of information’ that would be intelligently served to him, anticipating where he was during his day and on multiple devices: iWatch, iPhone & iPad.
Early sketchbook ideation.
Storyboard and scenario for our persona.
Our persona: Captain Dave.
I validated key features through user testing to ensure our design met pilots' needs and expectations. Resulting in a comprehensive pilot toolkit: Crew Dashboard, Cross Team Communication, Personal and Informational apps, validated through pilot testing to ensure authenticity and alignment with their mental models.
Low-Fi wireframes: Testing a dashboard design.
Early dashboard following material design.
Designing cards to deliver flight information.
We tested our storyboards and final prototype with pilots on the ground, changing data, UI tab headings, checklist hierarchy and final movie scenes to accurately reflect the pilot experience based on feedback.
Director pitch movie: High fidelity wireframe shows how critical flight information is delivered to pilots in the cockpit.
Scenario based testing in the field.
The next stage was putting our refined user tested sketches into digital wireframes. Using Figma, Sketch and InVision to accomplish this prototype I gave users the same tasks to accomplish. All users said the experience felt comfortable and easy to use.
Some key takeaways were:
Asset spacing, there was a risk of a ‘fat finger’ error when tapping buttons. Naming groups was not apparent and read receipts weren’t entirely clear.
With these changes in mind:
We created a walk through of the messaging screens used in this scenario and sent annotated wireframes to Brightwheel stakeholders to get everyone on board with the direction we were headed.
I helped to secure a five-year $25 Million roadmap for stage 2 project funding; delivering a high fidelity prototypes (for iWATCH, iPHONE & iPAD devices), assets, pitch movie and documentation.
OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) Achieved:
● Reduce pilot, IT delays and cancellations
● Reduce number of places a pilot must go for information
● Improve departure rates for issues not related to pilot events
● Increase number of integration points between apps
● Reduce friction points: number of times required to login, enter profile data or schedule day/location
Final director level project movie. (available upon request)
FINAL ASSET: Pre-Flight Hub: An intelligent experience that serves customized flight critical information to the Pilot and improves crew coordination.
FINAL ASSET: Interaction Design: Contextual updates provide the right information at the right time.
FINAL ASSET: Pilot in-flight event timeline, providing contextual information at the right time.
I'm always open to friendly emails!
alex(at)dangerousdesigner.com
