FliteDeck Pro 3.0

Building the Complete Charting App

In 2015 FlightDeck Pro was regarded as not only Jeppesen’s most successful mobile application, but also the most successful mobile charting application used by Commercial Airlines. Since electronic flight bags have been introduced to reduce or replace the airline pilot’s reliance on paper for manuals and instrument charts, airlines have seen a savings of roughly $1,575,000 a year on fuel alone.

FlightDeck Pro was the key application that made this possible since it offered most of Jeppesen’s navigation charting products at the finger tips of the pilot, however since its introduction in 2012 the application struggled with usability, information saliency, and data availability. Additionally, as more operators adopted FliteDeck Pro as their source of navigation information for their pilots, more has been demanded from FliteDeck Pro. I joined the FD Pro UX team that helped take years of user research, and implement it in to FlightDeck Pro 3.0; the largest update to the application since it was first introduced.

To protect proprietary information, I have omitted and obfuscated information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Jeppesen or Boeing.

Jeppesen Mobile TC (Terminal Charts)

FliteDeck Pro 1.1

FliteDeck Pro 3.0

There was information, but details were buried or squirreled away

Jeppesen has a long tradition of providing paper and electronic flight information to airlines and pilots from all over the world, but moving that information in to a dynamically rendered map exposed several challenges for the application. There were constant questions on what information should be shown and when. Show too much, the user becomes overloaded, confused, and refuses to the use the application. Expose too little, and the user risks missing something important, which could lead to a regulation violation or worse.

As the FD Pro design team conducted more User Interviews and User Testing sessions; the need to contextually show information, and display previously analog only information became more paramount. These problems weren’t going to be solved by just exposing more information on the screen, or adding in a new mode to the application. The application needed to be rebuilt and redesigned from the ground up, all the while retaining the aspects that made it so successful.

My Role:

I became the point of contact between the development team, the requirements analysts, and the UX team. Additionally, I helped lead user research and testing, as well as authoring UX documentation and design requirements for the project.

Need to get from New York to London? No Sweat!

Keep the Fundamentals, but build it new

The our goals were to seamlessly integrate the navigation between the existing terminal chart and enroute views of the application. Enhance how Pilots access and view information as it pertains to their route, and integrate more information in to the application rather than forcing the Pilot to go outside of the application to reference another source for navigation data. At the same time, we dedicated ourselves keeping the solid foundation that had made FD Pro so successful.

The most important aspect to accomplishing these goals was user engagement. The FD Pro UX team conducted hundreds of user interviews; desktop testing sessions, live simulator sessions and even flew jump seat with active crews from around the world to understand how operator needs varied and yet were similar from region to region, airline to airline. Out of this research grew an understanding of the similarities and differences between general aviation pilots and commercial airline pilots. The team and I found common threads, pain points, and topics that needed to be addressed, not only by redesigning the application’s UI, but by also through working with Jeppesen’s information production department to create new veins of information to feed in to the application, or further flesh out existing back end databases.

Taking out the guesswork of, "Are we there yet?"

Growing Powerful Partnerships and Relationships for the Future

Another key to the team’s success was the relationship that we helped build between Apple and Jeppesen’s UXD department. On several occasions, the FD Pro UX team and I had the opportunity to visit Apple in Cupertino and show them the progress of FD Pro’s design. Through that relationship, we became very savvy in understanding the details of iOS design, and how Apple conducts rapid research and design sprints. This information was shared with the whole Jeppesen UX team, and lead to the creation of Jeppesen’s design sprint initiative.

When FD Pro 3.0 was released, pilot could now easily navigate to specific terminal charts, even if they were viewing the enroute map. The update featured the Route List, which elevated specific details as it pertained to the Pilot’s entered route. Routes systems that help the pilot cross vast open areas of water and desert were now available. This eliminated the need for pilots carry paper charts for these areas, and manually mark down the waypoints that made up the routes.