Performance

The Performance app was developed for Gulfstream pilots to calculate necessary takeoff and landing distances based on different airport and aircraft configurations. The manual process for these calculations can take up to 20 minutes per calculation and is extremely prone to errors.

DISCOVERY

Our team conducted interviews with pilots and performance engineers in order to understand their analog process for performance planning. We ended up with a good idea of all of the inputs and outputs the users expected to see in the app, but we did not know how they should be organized.

We performed a card sort with 5 internal pilots, which helped us organize the input fields into cards. We followed the same organizational structure for the outputs to help users find information more quickly.

DARK COLOR SCHEME TESTING

Gulfstream had never created an application that could potentially be used during night flying. It was very important that the Performance application did not interfere with pilots’ night vision. Our team created a new “dark” application color scheme, which we tested and iterated through several rounds of testing with pilots.

During first two rounds of testing, we asked each pilot to sit in a dark room for 20 minutes, allowing their night vision to adjust completely. After 20 minutes, we asked them to look at a mock-up screen on the iPad and report their reactions. After the first two rounds of testing, we learned that there was only enough time to develop one color scheme in the app, so we then needed to determine if the “dark” scheme would work just as well in bright daylight. With this new goal in mind, we conducted the third and final round of testing with pilots in the flight deck of a G550 during a production test flight.

USABILITY TESTING

We conducted two rounds of usability testing with internal pilots. In the first round, we provided specific inputs to enter, but in the second round, we simply asked them to “perform a successful calculation.” By allowing the participants more flexibility, we learned that pilots have a tendency to read through every single input field before calculating. Previously, we thought that they wouldn’t read through the ones that don’t change every calculation. This ended up guiding the team away from hiding or collapsing these input fields.