Simplifying aircraft test requirements and authoring document generation that replaced multiple tools and streamlined the process.
Simplifying Flight Test Requirement management
Project overview
Challenge
The current process of Work Request Document (WRD) for execution by engineers, involves multiple tools such as Excel and Word, which can be time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, the generated WRD must pass through various stakeholders for approval before publication, which can also add complexity and delays to the process.
My role
UX Designer
Time
4 months
Solution
Provide a unified solution to streamline the process and simplify the task of gathering and documenting the test requirements for flight.
Tasks
Task flow, Wireframing and prototyping
Tools
Axure RP
Project Goal
The user needs to collect aircraft test requirements from various teams and generate a Work Request Document (WRD) sent to engineers to execute the tests and provide results for analysis.
The elite aircraft engineers must execute certain tests and publish results before a flight is ready for take-off. This task is initiated by creating a work request document (WRD) where the aircraft engineers collect test requirements from various teams and generate WRD. The generated document passes through various stakeholders and needs to get approved at each phase before it gets published.
This activity was executed with MS tools like Excel and Word and some 3rd party applications. The project's goal is to build a web application that could replace multiple tools being used in one unified solution.
User research & Persona
With a limited set of users, a two-day user research activity was conducted by an onsite counterpart from my team. Based on the outcome of the user research, we created personas for whom we are going to develop this application. This exercise helped us, the UX team and all other stakeholders to understand the critical needs and the pain points of our users. One pattern we could follow from most of our users was that they want to reuse the existing WRD instead of freshly creating a new one.
Persona of an elite flight engineer
Mapping workflows
Another valuable outcome from the user research was that we were able to identify the complete set of user roles involved, each activity performed by each user, and the end-to-end workflow. We did an exercise of visualizing this through a workflow diagram so that we made sure everyone is aligned in our understanding. This exercise also helped us to understand the responsibilities & privileges assigned to each persona and the end-to-end workflow of the WRD from authoring to approval.
High Level workflow diagram
Wireframes and visual design
The persona and the workflow diagram helped us understand the most critical and frequent tasks performed by the user and based on this we started to draft low fidelity wireframes. This was either through rough sketches or whiteboard sessions. We presented our design to our customers to articulate our design ideas and re-iterated as required.
Based on the customer’s approval we developed a high fidelity clickable prototype and demonstrated how the application will behave in specific scenarios. The clickable prototypes helped us get rapid feedback on whether the intended design works well or needs to be updated in some areas.
Wireframe of WRD authoring tool
Similarity Analysis tool
In order to create work authorization reports (WRD), the elite test engineers need to analyze the test requirements and conditions. Different comparison tools were developed to compare test conditions.
Similarity analysis is the tool that enables the users to perform this activity by comparing different test conditions and based on their attributes and values, their association with other test conditions and perform this activity they need a tool that could compare different sets of test conditions based on their attributes and values, their association with other test conditions and based on their comparison results, the test conditions will be added to the WRD.
A provision to manually enter sample details as a form. This is helpful for users to register samples in an impromptu way.
A provision to manually enter sample details as a form. This is helpful for users to register samples in an impromptu
Results
30% Reducection in WRD creation
A survey conducted before and after the implementation of the showed a significant decrease in the amount of time spent creating WRDs, with an average reduction of 30%.
15% Reducction in WRD rejections
The number of rejected WRDs due to errors or missing information decreased by 15% after implementing the similarity analysis tool.