Digital Aviation Marketplace
The Digital Aviation Marketplace is a revolutionary vision to bring a very analog industry into the 21st century by digitizing complex and heavily regulated aviation product sales and making them accessible to customers around the world. We were brought in mid-stream, as a digital design partner to help align stakeholders and quickly design an MVP eCommerce experience that, at launch, would feature a curated selection of digital and hard good products and would scale to include their entire offering of aviation products over the next 3 years.
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
Challenges
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.
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