Aurora Perez - Portfolio - Viasat Aerodocs Platform

Project Overview

The Challenge

Airlines need to ensure their staff is supported with accurate and timely information to make the right decision at any time and any place. They need a reliable and secure platform to create, manage, distribute and view complex operational and technical documentation.

The team had to completely re-invent and re-architecture an archaic XML editor with a sharp learning curve, into a modern cloud-based platform, that any airline staff could use intuitively, to ensure accurate and timely access to information.

My Role

Lead Designer (member of the Product Core Team)

Contribution

Product vision and strategy, business analysis, competitor analysis, user research, interaction flows, low and high-fidelity prototyping, validation and feedback loop.

Core Team process and Systems Thinking to improve ways of working.

My Role

Lead Designer

__________

I was part of the Aerodocs team from 2014 to 2020. I lead the design of Aerodocs as part of a team of 50 front and back-end developers, product owners, project managers and business analysts.

As Senior Product Experience Designer, I was responsible for the design integrity of Aerodocs, striving to integrate seamlessly with the needs, capabilities and activities of our users, and making the interaction with the product a pleasant and gratifying experience.

I was involved in conversations with airlines and other relevant stakeholders to understand the business and user needs to determine the best course of action. I worked with the team to create user journey maps, ran functional team workshops, sketched out possible solutions and validated them, developed high fidelity interactive mockups and collaborated with developers and QA engineers to ensure best outcomes.

I worked with service delivery, customer support and training to gather insights to improve the product in further iterations.

Part of the team during a design and planning session.

Aerodocs Editor before re-design, 2014.

Overview of Aerodocs

Information Management System

__________

WHAT IS AERODOCS

Aerodocs is a cloud-based service, that allows airlines to create, manage, distribute and view their documentation in a collaborative, secure and controlled environment.

Aerodocs provides secure document storage, access control, audited distribution, smart sharing, and reuse of data across the airline. It gives all users — airline operations, external partners, and regulators — access to documents with fast search facilities and offline viewing capabilities.

Airline administrators get real-time visibility and control of the distribution process, ensuring that all devices are updated and that all staff have access to the current document versions.

Aerodocs is integratee into existing airline systems to minimise the operational overhead, and ensure accuracy and consistency of information across all systems.

Aerodocs provides:

• Web-based document editor
• Document distribution from Web interface
• Document viewers for Web, iPad and Windows
• Integration with customer airlines' systems

Users only have access to the modules for which they have permissions.

WHO IS AERODOCS FOR

Aerodocs helps organisations with complex document creation flows:

• High volume of similar documents that are constantly revised.

• Frequently repeated creation processes.

• Government or corporate regulated documents.

• High possibility to reuse content across multiple documents.

• Integration of data into the content.

• Delivered in multiple formats (online, on native applications, printed).

• Delivered with multiple different presentation styles.

Aerodocs is used by thousands of airline professionals across some of the biggest airlines in the world, as well as some smaller carriers.

Technical operations experts, safety managers, engineers, pilots, cabin crew and many other airline staff rely on Aerodocs to ensure critical information is up-to-date and available.

Discovery

Managing documentation is complex, messy and spread out.

__________

KEY INSIGHTS

Through our discovery sessions with both users and our internal subject matter experts, we outlined 3 key insights:

1. Airlines need one easy-to-use platform for all their documents:

Airlines use multiple tools and systems for different types of documents: operational, corporate, original manufacturers manuals (eg Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, etc).

Some of this documents require specialist technical knowledge to manage and edit, which causes huge delays in the document revision cycle.

2. Any decision requires constant collaboration:

As in most knowledge based industries, airline staff in charge of documentation spend most of their time planning, organising, researching and discussing information.

Planning a new revision of a document is a complex collaborative effort, with a lot of moving parts. A lot of time is currently wasted sending pdfs by email for review and approval cycle. There's a need for effective, real-time collaboration and easy tracking of changes.

3. Documentation needs to be audit-proof

To ensure safety and accuracy, airlines need to keep records of all revisions, changes, research material, discussions and regulation referencesof all the documents they manage.

Airline staff need to ensure timely and accurate access to information, specially in critical situations (eg. Pilots and cabin crew in-flight)

We focused on 6 personas:

• Flight Ops Managers
• Technical Writers (Authors of Content)
• Subject Matter Experts (Reviewers of Content)
• Pilots
• Cabin Crew
• Ground Operations Staff

Here's a summarised experience map of our Technical Writer persona. You can see that most of the areas where we could improve her experience were around collaboration, planning and scheduling.

Ideation

Hide tech so people can focus on content.

Collaboration as priority.

__________

To address these insights, we decided to focus our design effort in the document editor and viewer components of the platform, with emphasis on these 4 areas:

1. Intuitive editing experience.

2. Real-time collaboration.

3. Activity tracking and access to history.

4. Clear viewing experience.

5. Display of actionable analytics

Aerodocs editor (2016)

2016

__________

Here's a view of Aerodocs after the re-design highlighting how we envisioned a better workflow for our users.

We completely re-designed of our web-based editor, allowing in-line editing of content so authors can focus on the content rather than the tool.

We implemented real-time authoring and commenting between authors and subject matter experts, as well as task management and integrated workflows to allow review and approval.

We developed revision control to ensure unapproved content is never distributed; activity history to see who, when and what has changed; options to include background and research material; and one of our most complexed features: shared and reusable content that avoids redundancy and duplicates, and links to regulations that saves airlines precious time during audits.

We re-designed our web and native viewer.

Documents sync automatically so all content is always up-to-date. Highlights and annotations are preserved in new revisions and different devices.

To allow constant improvement, we give Flight Operations managers an overview of the status of their documentation through a KPI dashboard.

Customer interview

Pragya Alok: Manager of Corporate Documentation

__________