How do we unify our 30 year old flight scheduling and routing software?
A national airline was struggling to maintain multiple outdated systems to schedule and route their flights. Each system was extremely deprecated and unusable — Training for the existing software took upwards of a year to fully learn.
From our research we discovered employees would negotiate changes verbally outside of the system and then commit those changes in the software, rather than using the software itself. Some departments created their own software to do the job that the corporate software couldn’t. Numerous mundane tasks were performed by humans instead of the system.
Activities
- Contextual Inquiry (Employees)
- Design Sketching/IA Workshops
- Affinity Diagramming
- Wall Walk
- Opportunity Prioritization Workshop
- Prototype Creation
- Case Study
- Airline
- Engagement Type
- B2E
Approach
We spent several weeks shadowing all network operations center roles, documenting their workflows during both calm and crisis modes. We conducted over 30 contextual inquiries in seven different departments.
We held bi-monthly design sketching workshops to highlight specific features and functions to collectively design a better interface for future prototypes.
Data Synthesis
We created an affinity wall of data with over 2000 data points. We also created a generic workflow diagram that illustrated shared pain points across all users and systems. We then hosted a workshop with stakeholders and employees to generate additional opportunities and possible solutions.
Output
Many of the activities employees conducted were hindered by the system so they would circumnavigate it with verbal communication, emails, texts and phone calls and THEN commit decisions thru the system. It took the average employee 20 minutes to start their day with multiple log ins configurations, data review from multiple sources, etc.
We identified all common features and functions repeated across multiple applications in order to help prioritize which backend systems could be sunsetted and which should remain to build the single, upgraded core.
