Modernizing the Skies: Redesigning Aircraft Maintenance for Speed, Clarity, and Impact

The Challenge

Research solutions to modernize the technology and experience in a way that expert users could easily transition to and that new employees could quickly learn.

Deeply integrated into tenured employee's workflows, this transformation was essential to ensure that customers received their multi-million dollar products on time, directly impacting payment and revenue flow.

Compliance

The existing application, originally built in VB6 in the mid-90s, had become unsupportable. It no longer met the rigorous standards set by their largest customer, the U.S. Military, with the timeline to update or risk losing contracts fast-approaching.

Documentation

A lack of documentation led to significant difficulties in maintaining and updating the system. The only remaining engineer who built the software was on the brink of retirement with nobody left with expertise in the system’s architecture.


Inefficiency

Repetitive steps and tedious tasks during data entry and review processes were impacting delivery time and increasing the risk of errors.

The Work

User Interviews and Research

We conducted initial interviews and shadow sessions with a diverse group of actual technicians and specialists. This direct engagement helped us understand the daily challenges and the nuances of the different workflows.

Sentiment was heavily divided with experienced employees making it clear that they would let us observe as long as their processes didn't change. Despite the resistance, it was clear in watching how they worked that there were efficiencies to be gained and a better working experience could be possible.

"Just don't change anything."

"It takes about 3 years to become an expert."

Employee quotes

Personas & Journey Mapping

With insights gathered, we developed detailed personas and journey maps to visualize the end-to-end user experience. These artifacts were crucial for aligning the design direction with user needs. It also helped bring to light that challenges faced by many users who previously were willing to accept the limitations as part of their job rather than an opportunity for improvement.

User personas were crafted to reflect the diverse domains of work across the organization. They were developed through extensive interviews and on-the-job shadowing 

"Utilizing existing program data would have saved 3 months and 45,000 manual line items"

Opportunity learned in interviews with employees

User journey maps capturing key pain points and opportunities within each working group and across the organization—shaped by insights from user interviews

Identifying Opportunities

Analysis of the journey maps revealed several repetitive and tedious tasks that were prime candidates for automation and simplification.

• Expert users know entry codes by heart but had to fill in a full page form which would output the results. Providing a top level entry to enter the code allowed experts to avoid form entry but still allow new users to fill in the form. It also flattened the learning curve to directly see the results of the form into the code generator.
• Connecting systems into the application would minimize the amount of windows all employees used to do their research. The data was there, it just was not accessible in the application.
• Basic editing functionalities like auto save, version control, and error handling were not available and simply accepted as part of process to figure out for longtime employees, but unexpected and frustrating for those learning the system.

Ideation & Concept Development

Based on the research, initial wireframes were created for each group's individual needs to address the identified pain points. Early input from users helped shape the structure and functionality of the new design, ensuring that the solution was both practical and user-centric.

One of the key takeaways was that each group needed specific functionality for their role where the old system assumed all users should see all available options within a static interface. Consistent patterns were leveraged where possible for easy cross-functional interoperability.

A selection of iterative wireframes across the 4 main working domains

Expert users, in particular, were slowed down by the original interface, which required selecting a dropdown for each option—multiplying the number of clicks and adding up significantly over hundreds of thousands of inputs.

I introduced a UI mechanism to allow expert users to quickly type in the code that was generated by the dropdown options. In conjunction with the form below it, it helped visually confirm choices and lowered the barrier of expertise, allowing less experienced trainees to learn how the code is connected to the choices selected. It also reduced errors, with a clearer indication of empty states.

Detail of new Quick Entry systems screen

Prototyping & Testing

Two rounds of detailed mockups and interactive prototypes were developed. These allowed users to engage with the new design in a testable environment, providing invaluable feedback and guiding subsequent iterations.



Collaborative Iteration

Early iterations proved to be too drastic for many users so we continued collaborating and iterating to find the right balance.

The final interface was both new and familiar, ensuring that each of the four major working groups could access the most used functionalities seamlessly, while still maintaining cross-functional visibility.

Final hi-fidelity mockups proposed to the group

The Outcome

As a Discovery Phase output, our recommendation reinforced the importance of aligning design solutions with user needs and the value of iterative feedback. We also determined the best technology to use with the following principles and a go-forward user experience to deliver:

Mockups of a full user's workstation utilizing the full breadth of the new system