The Problem
The Performance app was developed for Gulfstream pilots to calculate necessary takeoff and landing distances based on different airport and aircraft configurations. The manual process for these calculations can take up to 20 minutes per calculation. For one flight, a pilot may need to perform multiple calculations to account for changing variables. And the entire process is extremely prone to errors.
There was also some concern from the business that customer aircrafts were not meeting the publicized performance benchmarks. Proper flight configuration for the given conditions provides the expected real-world benchmarks. The Performance app helped pilots better understand the necessary aircraft setting for optimal performance in various situations – without the need to bring pilots in for additional training.
Discovery
Our user researcher conducted in-person and remote interviews with pilots, aircraft performance engineers, and internal stakeholders in order to understand their analog process for performance planning. Findings documents and transcripts were provided to the team, which included when, how, and why they performed these calculations. The research also included the common inputs and outputs necessary for a pilot to successfully calculate takeoffs and landing.
Ideation
We reviewed all the findings and derived specific insights as to what problems we really needed to solve and brainstormed specific solutions to those problems. Focusing on the biggest frustrations and areas of gain for the users.
As the experience design lead on the project, I began to ideate through sketching exercises and receiving quick turnaround feedback from the internal pilots.
While we ended up with a good idea of all of the inputs and outputs the users expected to see in the interface, we did not know how they should be organized. Our user research planned and performed card sorts with pilots which helped us organize the input fields into cards. We followed a similar organizational structure for the outputs to help users find information more quickly. This started to bring the general interactions and workflow to light and the interface started to take shape.
I wireframed out the application and began to work with engineering and aircraft performance engineers on feasibility issues and technical constrains. This led to a series of changes and gave me the comfort to then move to high fidelity prototyping using Proto.io. While the information density for the output screen was beyond my comfort zone, I was assured by the subject matter experts that the interface was much less dense than pilots were used to. The balance between information density, scalability, and understanding was one of my main concerns. This, along with a list of other questions, concerns, and goals was better left to usability (and value) testing.
The Dark Theme
Gulfstream had never created an application that could potentially be used during night flying. It was very important that the Performance app did not interfere with pilots’ night vision. I created a new “dark” application color scheme based on the existing cockpit display color palette, which we tested and iterated through several rounds with pilots.
During first two rounds of testing, our user researcher asked each pilot to sit in a dark room for 20 minutes, allowing their night vision to adjust completely. After 20 minutes, we asked them to look at a mock-up screen on the iPad and report their reactions. After the first two rounds of testing, we learned that there was only enough time to develop one color scheme in the app, so we then needed to determine if the “dark” scheme would work just as well in bright daylight. With this new goal in mind, we conducted the third and final round of testing with pilots in the flight deck of a G550 during an actual, 5-hour, production test flight.
After each round of theme testing the user researcher and I debriefed and made any obvious and necessary changes. A findings report and a list of recommendations was produced after the test flight. I utilized these learning and insights to deliver an enhanced theme that better fit with the ascetics of the cockpit – enabling pilots to task switch between the cockpit displays and the app more seamlessly.
Usability Testing & Iterations
User research conducted two rounds of usability testing with pilots. In the first round, we provided specific inputs to enter, but in the second round, we simply asked them to “perform a successful calculation.” By allowing the participants more flexibility, we learned that pilots have a tendency to read through every single input field before calculating.
Previously, we thought that they wouldn’t read through the ones that don’t change every calculation. These learnings ended up guiding me away from hiding or collapsing input fields that we not frequently utilized.
Engineering
After the second round of usability testing, we were comfortable moving user stories into the engineering sprints. I worked with engineering to understand the intended interactions and delivered the design metrics, interactions, business logic, and workflows necessary to develop the stories on a continuous basis. All ux defects were captured and the defects with the highest usability impact worked first.
Engineering of the Performance app lasted 6 months. There were multiple rounds of usability testing on live code performed by user research with the internal Gulfstream pilots to ensure the intended interactions worked as expected.
Reception
The Gulfstream marketing team brought the beta release and an accompanying video (below) to a national aerospace conference where it received glowing reviews. At the time of it's release, Performance was the 'crown jewel' of Gulfstream apps in terms of meeting the business objectives and customer needs.
