Inspired Flight Technologies (IFT)
Human Centered Design for New Drone Software Suite
Role: Contract UX Designer and Application Product Manager
Tools: Figma, Figjam, Google Suite, Clickup, Slack,
Collaborators: Worked closely with entire product team including CEO, Hardware Engineers, CS Engineers, Project Manager, Graphic Designer, Sales Operations, and Head of Operations. I was the only UX Designer and was fully responsible for all designs shown in this case study.
The Story: Inspired Flight Technologies is a drone company that leads the market in American Made, Industry - specific, heavy lift drones. These drones weigh about 45 lbs and carry expensive surveying equipment for utilities companies, the military, and other industries. Up until this point, IFT had been primarily focused on hardware design and manufacturing. Due to new FAA regulations and ever growing drone use cases, they have an opportunity to massively grow their sales - if they can stand out from competition. After building their drones on open source software, they wanted to build new software that was more usable, cost reducing for users, and increased customer valuation of IFT drones. I signed onto the team at the ideation phase. I then conducted research, collaborated with engineers, flew the drone, and talked with real users to define the product - a software consisting of 6 interdependent softwares connecting Drones to Pilots to Fleet Managers. I designed mobile first, conducted usability testing, and then collaborated with our developer to get the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) built.
Metrics & ROI:
Prior to bringing me onboard, the product was loosely defined and the sales in hardware were plateauing.
IFT has found that my work has:
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Created product definitions based on user needs and MVP limitations that has allowed the team to move forward quickly.
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Identified key insights around what users need and built designs to engage those needs
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Created a product with room to expand and grow into new untapped markets post MVP.
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Increased user understanding, engagement, and satisfaction with existing technology.
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Reduced the risk of building the wrong product
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Improved company wide understanding of customers - laterally leading IFT towards better hardware, marketing, and business decisions.
IFT had never attempted to design software nor done formal User Research
Starting from scratch, the CEO collected a team of contractors to start a new software project. Having no title and barely a description, it was simply referred to as "Project Cleo". Inspired Flight had proven themselves adept at innovating hardware - revolutionizing the American drone industry for the last 7 years. However, all ground control stations (remote controls) were still operating on open source software that was not accessible, had many unnecessary features, and was prone to crashing. Additionally, IFT was beginning to realize that the standard model of maintenance was just not working for Drones.
The project was based on this concept:
Drone maintenance temporarily increases risk of failure, therefore we should aim to reduce maintenance to only when it is absolutely necessary.
To solve this problem with software, we needed to collect flight data on the drones, run it through AI/ML algorithms, and identify early indicators of failure before the drone crashed into the ground. Then we could use those indicators to inform users (drone fleet managers) when the drone is actually ready for maintenance, therefore innovating on current drone models to reduce cost, satisfaction, and efficiency for our users.
This is all pretty theoretical - so we needed to actually validate with users that they actually wanted this. Additionally, seeing the struggles the company was also going through with hardware, I knew that we needed to do comprehensive user research and gain insights that would help the entire company interact with their target customers more effectively.
Our software allows users to m maximize the "Normal Life" of their drones.
I interviewed Users and Sales Operations staff to gain a comprehensive picture of our target customer.
I established working relationships with our sales operations team and 5 real customers.
I asked them questions across a variety of topics, including things about what their working hours are like, how many employees they have, their company goals, preferred drone characteristics, why they chose IFT in the first place, experience with our maintenance team, experience with other companies, and how they would describe our product to others in the industry.
These interviews created a lot of data. I affinity mapped the content into different topics based on company team, color coded the information so that relationships between small companies and large companies could be identified, then organized the insights into How Might We statements to prompt employees to create solutions to these customer pain points.
Information organized into different company verticals to maximize utility of my findings
Color coded headers allowed us to find relationships between small & large companies for future step pricing strategy.
Sub categorized into "I..." statements to see common threads between customers
Persona Posters were shared and hung up in the office to promote a more Human Centered Design process company wide.
After learning so much about our users, I saw the need to share the findings not just with our software team, but with the company as a whole. There were issues that needed to be addressed not just on the software side, but in hardware, marketing, maintenance, mindset, and business strategy.
I created these posters to promote human centered design (problem solving) and advocated for user needs. This spread the value of UX design across many verticals, even when I was operating as a solo designer.
How Might We statements highlight insights and create actionable prompts for employees, generating value in many verticals
To help define the product and to stimulate ideation, I hosted a design studio activity with the entire team and created user flows
Realizing the true size of this project, we began to see that there was a lot to take into consideration and we needed to slim the ideas down into an actionable MVP strategy with defined features.
To help us through this process, I hosted a Design Studio. We followed Nielson Norman's crazy 8's method. This allowed us to generate 100's of ideas and get everyone's thoughts out on the table. By the end of the day, we had rough sketches of how to proceed with our ideas, both front end and back end.
We realized we needed to get many softwares to work together: the drone onboard computer, the ground control station, the cloud (connected over spotty cell service in the field), an app, a desktop site, a data uploading tool, and an IFT internal tool.
We were able to move past initial ideation and get to building.
I built a comprhensive user flow to help the team discuss the details of how the 7 softwares would work together
These user flows allowed our team to collaborate and talk about a lot of different things simultaneously. We could see where one software needed to connect to another and what each needed to be able to do. This promoted discussions, questions, and defining elements of the MVP.
I built mid fidelity designs of the mobile app in Figma to validate the product with users
To get started on this massive project, I decided to take a mobile first approach and start with the Fleet Manager's mobile app. It was the center piece for our technology and the newest thing that we would ask our customers to use. Targeting user feedback here would help us validate if this is the right product to invest in and whether or not they would actually use it.
There is some color at this stage because the effectiveness of the stoplight color system was one of the primary things I was testing with users.
Checkout some of the mid fidelity screens below.
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The Fleet Manager's dashboard - users are able to see the statuses of all of the drones in their fleet.
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A drone's profile - users can see the alert history and notes added by pilot
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A Pilot's profile - they can see pilot information including flight hours and experience.
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Reading an automated note from the drone's onboard computer.
Based on Usability Testing I iterated on the designs and passed the high fidelity designs onto the developer
Usability testing showed that users were interested in the Aircraft Tab and the Pilots tab. They were interested in adding preflight checklists (a feature they had brought up in interviews, but we had initially put off for post MVP). After realizing that preflight checklists was some user's primary interest in the app, we put it back into the MVP to help drive up customer engagement in the integration of the app into their workflow.
Check out some of the updated high fidelity screens. I changed the layout of the alerts. Users expressed an interest in being able to mark a drone as a different status, so I added a feature that lets them edit a drone's status. Additionally a new preflight checklist allows IFT to eventually collect preflight checklist data in post MVP iterations.
Click here to see the full prototype
Update: After more than a year of Ideation, MVP definition, & expanding my role to include Product Management,
PilotGo is on the app store!
As our team shifted from ideation, design, and testing - it was time to build! I found myself wearing many hats in this small agile team.
My new PM responsibilities included:
1. Onboarding new software developers and collaborating with them to define exactly how the software should work. (6 interconnected platforms in your MVP require a lot of careful decision making to decide how the software's internal architecture will support future cross platform interactions).
2. Defining the launch process of our new "Inspired Suite" with our CEO, hardware engineering lead, and sales lead and validating our assumptions in regular meetings with customers and our own Flight Operations team.
3. Project Managing a rapidly changing team. We tried a few different methods (different Clickup configurations, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, gdoc templates) before finally landing on a method that worked best in our team. (Spreadsheet with columns for each stakeholder and progress bars to indicate progress).
4. Adjusting our project features as issues, customer feedback, and new business needs arose. While many of these situations are frustrating, these were necessary obstacles to make our project leaner, more profitable for the company, and better serve our customer's needs.
To learn more about my experience being a project manager click the button below.