Digital Aviation Marketplace
Bringing aviation sales into the digital age with Boeing’s first user-focused marketplace.
Client: Boeing
Role: UI/UX designer
Timeline: Initial ask - 6 weeks; user testing and refinement period extended by 5 months
Tools: Sketch, Invision, Whimsical, Zeplin, Principle, Keynote, Confluence
The Challenge
Major business decisions were made from the top down, with little to no communication to those employees who had to implement changes and interface with customers. This created a stressful situation for the product teams that would bear the burden of supporting the initial launch. The "out-of-the-box" approach also left many critical aviation-specific needs unaddressed.
Opportunities
As a creative partner with insight into both the goals and vision of upper level management and the clear anxieties of the product owners who maintained face-to-face relationships with their customers, we were uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between vision and needs.
Our team worked onsite, collaborating closely with the product managers who were tasked curating the initial product offerings at launch. This real-time validation and partnership resulted in the product team being heard and seen, as well as opening channels for us to find users to test and refine our designs with.
A cohesive design system
As a part of our MVP sprint, we worked to develop a new visual style for them. A simultaneous branding effort was being done for their marketing sites, and we worked closely with them to make sure that our efforts aligned and there was visual cohesion between all sites in the brand’s ecosystem. I worked with a digital production team to interpret visual designs from the marketing sites for eCommerce applications, overseeing the production of visual assets and motion studies.
Discovery
This challenge statement sounded like a website redesign, which is a solution to a problem we couldn’t yet see. To work on uncovering the why? behind the ask, myself, the PM, and a UX researcher developed a workshop using a few ice breakers and an exercise called The Ripple Effect. Typically, this exercise is used to uncover and map out all user groups, from internal users like staff, to primary, secondary, and even tertiary users. For this particular workshop, we flipped the script and worked out from a question. Who would be effected if the WEC didn’t have a new website/activity hub?
Through this exercise we were able to get a clearer vision of who they served and what problems they were up against. Running an old, outdated website had a wide impact on everyone from their own staff members who struggled to maintain content, to volunteers and donors, and even broader to Washington state legislators and the failure of big environmental initiatives.
As soon as we identified key users, we dove into contacting and interviewing individuals from these groups. Their insight validated what we suspected; that the WEC struggled to get their story out clearly and keep clear paths to engage. From this research, we proposed a new challenge statement:
How might we help WEC tell their story so their programs can excite new audiences to take action?
The Solution
Visual design elements
The visual design system we delivered was pressure tested with a variety of product types, break points, and accessibility standards. With the in-house team, we also worked to make sure it could scale and evolve as more products are included in the marketplace.
A flexible system
Working with Boeing teams, we worked to determine which pages and features needed to be flexible and customizable in order to meet the unique needs of each product type.
Outcome
Ultimately, through building relationships and going above and beyond the initial production ask by advocating for research and data-driven iterative processes, a focus on the user needs and pain points, we were able to develop an MVP marketplace that meets the needs of the initial product offering with the flexibility to grow and evolve as need for future product offerings.
As the lead UI/UX designer on the MVP market implementation team, I stepped into the role of liaison, presenting all up work to new stakeholders, managing implementation of UI styles and patterns across internal creative teams, and setting up processes to share and work collaborative across Boeing and subsidiary brand design teams.
As a result of this relationship building, greater transparency and alignment in tool usage and design system implementation has been achieved by internal teams. Several subsidiaries have also been able to take our guidelines and apply them to their brands.
“Rachel’s work on the Digital Aviation Marketplace this past year has required that she work very closely with clients and partner agencies. She has been able to successfully navigate often tricky situations of competing interests, and yet always advocates for good work and drives that work forward. She has indeed been adept at producing quality designs under tight deadlines for key stakeholders and executives, and represented our agency with poise and dignity.”
Michael Collins, Design Director at This Place