Aurora Perez - Portfolio - Aerodocs Content Tagging

Project Overview

The Challenge

Allow Flight Operations personnel responsible for documentation to classify content using meaningful tags, so that pilots can find the information they need to do their job faster and much more accurately.

You'd be familiar with tags from online shopping, for example, when you search for 't-shirt', 'red', 'size 10', you get what you are looking for because items are well classified in the database. Similarly, pilots could be selecting 'take-off', 'icy conditions', 'wind shear' to find what they need to proceed safely in a given situation.

My Role

Lead Designer (member of the Product Core Team)

Contribution

User research, interaction flow diagram, low and high-fidelity prototyping, validation and feedback loop.

My Role

Lead Designer

__________

I led the design work for this feature of the product. I was involved in discovery sessions with both technical pilots and documentation specialists to understand why it's essential for them to find faster and more efficient ways to access the information that allows them to do their job safely.

I worked with the customer in ideation sessions; brainstorming and whiteboarding different ideas, using techniques such as user story mapping to stay focused on the user, uncover product features, help with estimation, expose potential risks and find team consensus.

I developed low and high-fidelity prototypes that were used to validate various solutions and I worked with the team to get feedback early and iterate our prototypes to best meet the needs of our users.

The Challenge

Tagging documents that can be 1,000s of pages long

__________

Pilots are overwhelmed with information, which can be very dangerous in safety critical situations. They frequently need to access various manuals (Aircraft Operation Manual, Quick Reference Handbook, Minimum Equipments List, to name a few) as well as bulletins, notices and other information.

These manuals are thousands of pages long and contain information critical for the safety of the flight.

In order to assist pilots in their job, Flight Ops staff responsible for documentation need to be able to classify the content in those documents following a taxonomy system that's relevant to pilot's needs. These experts would use tags that describe phases of flight, weather conditions, technical equipment, location and many others.

Regarding Flight Ops personnel, the goal was to provide our users with an efficient way to manage the tags in the system (adding, deleting or updating); as well as an intuitive way to find those tags, assign them to the content and review/test them to ensure there are no errors.

Doing this high level mapping helped a lot with planning and estimating.

Discovery

Over 600 tags in different languages

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During our discovery phase, we gained some useful learning that presented some interesting design and technical challenges. Below are some examples:

01. Volume of tags

We learned that the volume of tags Flight Operations would need to use would be much larger than we had anticipated. We analysed the content of various spreadsheets that included over 600 tags describing:

• Aircraft types (A320,A380, 777, 737)
• Operations (制限区域, ETOPS, TCAS, NOTAM)
• Navigation (通信, RNAV)
• Aircraft Systems (Landing gear)
• Phase of Flight (T/O, Land)

... to name only a few.

This presented a big challenge for the assignment and management of tags.

02. Multi-language

As the previous example shows, tags could be in multiple languages and we needed to support Japanese characters for our Japanese customers, which would affect the filtering and sorting.

03. Flat vs. hierarchical structure

Tags would need to be flat (not hierarchical) and additive, meaning that if an author assigns the tags 'navigation' and 'wind shear' to a procedure, other tags related to navigation or wind shear should not be automatically assigned.

However, the high volume of tags meant that authors required an efficient system to classify the different tags:

Eg. To find the tag 'AUTOLAND', authors would need to browse through 'Aircraft/Navigation/Category/CAT3/AUTOLAND'

Also, users requested that the same tag could be listed under different sections:

Eg. 'EFB' could be under 'Aircraft/Operations/EFB' or 'Crew/Pilot/EFB'

Even though the tag could be found both under 'Crew' or under 'Operations', it would be the same tag and this should need to be clear on the interface. Authors could also add both 'Crew' and 'Operations' as tags that they could use together with 'EFB'.

Also authors required tags to be listed available to them in alphabetical order, with the exception of phases of flight, which would need to be sequential:

Eg. (DISP, GND PRE, TAXI, TO, CLB, CRZ, DES, APP, LDG, GND POST, Go Around, Diversion, Taxi)

05. Automatic tagging

For the tagging process to be efficient, users required that the assignment of tags would cascade respecting the hierarchy of the document.

Eg. If a heading were tagged with "Take off", all content that's part of the heading should automatically receive the "Take off" tag.

This presented a number of interaction and usability challenges: What happens in case of copy/paste? How do we differentiate between manually or automatically added tags? How do we show the scope of a tag?

We also learned that tagging would be a specialist role performed by experience technical pilots.

Ideation