Simplifying content access and management for pilots

The Problem:

An international plane manufacturer needed transform the way their pilots accessed flight-critical documentation and ensure operational compliance. Previously, this was a completely manual process, with pilots carrying around physical booklets with potentially 1000s of pages of information. Any updates to compliance or operating procedure had to be emailed and physically printed by pilots, leaving our client with no way of tracking which pilots had the correct documentation.

Our Process & Solution:

Our team designed and built an iPad-based content management system that focused on simplicity and ease of use. Our client was able to push real-time content updates, which would automatically download to a user’s device when connected to wifi or when manually triggered by the user. Users could also favorite documents and create collections for easy access to their most used information. However, the most important aspect of this application was our “emergency procedures search” which allowed pilots to find documentation on emergency cockpit messages through a variety of ways, including two-handed typing, click-based navigation, and in the future, voice control. Results were sorted based on their emergency status, meaning that your most critical alerts would always be displayed first.

Though the functionality in this application is extremely simple, the environments in which users were accessing it made usability the key focus of this application. Our team worked to outline the many different extreme use-cases and outlined the technical and environmental constraints as a key part of our design process. The application needed to be absolutely intuitive, as pilots would be using it in-flight and would be unable to contact any web or telephone based support. It also needed to be legible in differently lit environments, so the design needed to support high contrast light and dark modes. Today, v1 of this application is live on the app-store and is being tested in flight training.