Base Airframe Mobility App
Base Airframe Mobility
A tool for maintenance technicians, inspectors, and supervisors to organize and maintain a record of all work done to an aircraft during its time at a base.
United Airlines
2021
Project type
Desktop web application
Responsibilities
Requirements gathering, Heuristics Analysis, Task Analysis, Information Architecture, Experience Design, Cognitive Walkthroughs, QA
The tool lacked interconnectivity, creating a bottleneck for the maintenance teams to complete their jobs efficiently.
We had to address the current dashboards’ usability problems before implementing new functionality.
Navigation and information hierarchy
Unnecessary content separation via tabbed navigation which divided workflows. Important content persisted in both tabs which created redundancy.
User flows and clear calls to action
Different buttons brought users to the same places, but inconsistent button styles created confusion.
Primary and secondary user groups
Maintenance supervisors had use cases that
made it important for them to interact with more information than inspectors or technicians.
Design an interconnected dashboard that meets the need for all users to complete their desired workflows.
Who are the maintenance users?
supervisors
Oversee aircraft visits, manage shift scheduling, order different parts and tools to ensure repairs run smoothly. Primary users
Inspectors
Leads that oversee a team of technicians. Can approve or reject maintenance tasks, and run the shifts. Spend most of their shifts working near or on the plane. Secondary users.
Technicians
Conduct the thousands of maintenance tasks required before an aircraft can return to service. Spend most of their shifts working near or on the plane. Secondary users.
How might we design this tool to harmoniously integrate into the maintenance team’s workflow and create alignment between the three groups?
We encouraged stakeholders to approach this product from a macro perspective rather than as individual tasks that need to be accomplished.
We hosted workshops to map out the supervisor’s workflow and uncover painpoints. The outcome of our sessions was that there was a need for an evolved dashbaord that encompassed information about both the aircraft visit, scheduling, and templates.
A challenge was figuring out a way to show specific information applicable to certain user groups.
While our primary concern was designing for supervisors, we still needed to consider the experience for the inspectors and the technicians. Since their responsibilities differed, they did not require as much detail/information in their visit dashboard.
Design iterations
We broke the content down into three major groups.
Aircraft content: highest level, applies to specific plane being serviced. It contains information related to the visit and the ability to complete it, as well as navigation to other aircraft-related information.
Visit content: has a status overview for different types of tasks being addressed during the visit. Buttons navigate to workload overview where technicians and inspectors can view more details about their task load take action.
Template content: contains everything related to shift scheduling for the visit, and an overview of important organizational groupings esoteric to the supervisors, with the option to dive deeper.
Supervisors could save a template for future similar visits, which significantly sped up the time needed to schedule incoming visits.
Creating templates enables supervisors the ability to copy information over from one aircraft visit and apply it to other, similar visits from other aircrafts, to prevent days to weeks of rework.
The visit dashboard framework influenced the a visit template. It is consistent with the supervisor only portion of the visit dashboard to decrease cognitive load necessary to efficiently conduct their workflow.
Outcomes
The product works more synonymously with how supervisors actually conduct their workflow.
The new dashboard provides value to their process, rather than needing extra brainpower.
Combining two separate workflows into one made a lot of sense as they are connected. They could now be accessed together to ensure a better overall experience, and reducing redundancies.
The company does have analytics for internal tools, so we only received positive qualitative feedback.
Learnings
Keep asking the questions to understand and uncover the real problems.
It took a long time to gain the trust of our stakeholders. After much time relationship building, we were able to come together in a truly collaborative effort and maximize outcomes
Continue to identify gaps in the experience to further improve the tool
What could be improved?
Due to scope constraints, we held focus groups with supervisors for feedback, rather than true usability testing. It would be valuable to observe in real time
Post-production experimentation and implementing analytics to continue improving the experience