Aircraft Health Management System

The client had a clear vision on how the product should perform but not much in the area of what it should look like.

As much as this was a product design project, it was also about visualizing real and meaningful data. That is what we focused on first based on how it was going to be used. Some discovery was performed already but all based on the previous iteration of the product.

Our team was brought in to design and develop the 2.0 version. Ultimately, our client wanted to offer the product as a white-label product to commercial airlines across the world.

We had three months to produce a full prototype, but we had five weeks to produce an MVP demo for an industry conference that our client was attending. And the demo came first.

My partner on the project became the lead for the agile scrum team and I was the UX lead working with the development team. I also played a negotiator role between the product owner and the stakeholders. With all of the research performed and requirements determined, I first needed to validate that the current-state assessment was correct. Validation came through interviews with the engineers who designed the parts the product was intended to monitor as well as the clients that we were serving.

With discovery validated and a success criteria determined, I was ready to design the demo. When it was introduced at the conference, it got great reviews from those in attendance — and useful insight on where the full prototype needed to improve.

With the improvements came a new need for further validation. This time I conducted tests with engineers from our client's customers: the airlines. Hands-on access to the actual users helped refine the design to the exact specifications our end-users were expecting — shaving off rounds of iterations and weeks off the delivery time.

The success of this project led to three more projects and eight more months with the client, becoming the anchor that allowed our firm to open a new office in that market.