FLIGHT TEST MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Gulfstream’s Flight Test Management System (FTMS) is a responsive web app for Flight Test Engineers (FTEs) to manage the many requirements to certify new aircraft. The system had been attempted twice before, the most recent having been abandoned by the users in favor of spreadsheets. These spreadsheets caused rampant inconsistencies across groups and did not allow for tracking or reporting at the program level. We estimate that the new FTMS system will save approximately 4,260 man-hours per model certified after its deployment. I was the lead designer on this project, working alongside design partners at times.

Discovery

Our team conducted 17 interviews including both project stakeholders and users. We focused on understanding why the original application was not being used and the processes different groups were following as workarounds.

It turned out that the old application had poor performance, often taking 2, 10, even 30 seconds to load. This was the root cause for frustration and abandonment. It was also missing some essential functionality that would have kept the various working groups more aligned on verbiage, process, and formatting of documents. 

We needed to better understand the FTEs’ process from start to finish so that we would have a better idea of where the new FTMS would fit into their day. We decided to bring in a small subset of users to participate in a user journey mapping session. The final user journey was so complex that it contained 5 phases and over 50 steps total. 

The original intention of the project was to reuse as much of the original FTMS as possible to speed development time. So, as an additional discovery activity, we did a usability assessment of the existing system. We discovered many hidden actions such as right-clicks, unnecessary modals, vague iconography, a lack of visual hierarchy, and validated the users’ complaints of poor performance. We determined that the front end should not be utilized in any capacity, but the developers would attempt to reuse as much of the back end as they could, while improving the performance along the way.

Initial Design & Testing

We began with a few sketching sessions as a team that were then turned into wireframes. Other teams within Business Technology had started utilizing Angular as a standard web platform, so our team decided to follow suit for speed and maintainability. When we moved into a more high-resolution design, we tried to design as close to default Material as possible. FTMS was one of the UX team’s first web projects, so we were able to build out a reusable web design system along with the project deliverables, also helping the developers by reusing existing components.

We went through 2 rounds of usability testing on clickable prototypes. We learned a lot more about the poor choices in verbiage on the original system (we had used a lot of the same wording) and some improvements on our new choices (“bulk-edit” rather than “multi-edit”). However, it seemed like the testing created more questions than it answered. We realized that we would need ongoing support from the users due to the complexity of the application and processes.