The Unseen Interfaces of Inflight Entertainment

THE BACKGROUND

The Crew Panel are 1-4 screens at both the front and back of the aircraft and is used by two important user groups: the ground maintenance crew, who use these dedicated displays to prepare the aircraft for flight, as well as data gathering for performance purposes, and the flight crew, who are tasked with juggling a number of customer and technical services during flight. Their user experience, while not as directly correlated to revenue opportunities, greatly impacts the success of a flight’s success, and is therefore just as critical as that of the passenger.

MY CONTRIBUTIONS

A unique challenge for my team, the Crew Panel was, for RAVE’s first 10 years, designed by engineers, not designers. As a single interface that is shared across SPI’s expanding airline base, SPI must continuously add to and refine the existing interface. In other words, my team had to make-due with the design elements and infrastructure that was already in place.

Starting in early 2017, I made it a top priority to create a dedicated roadmap and strategy to begin digging SPI out of this painful hole. The Passenger Experience collaborated closely with the airlines and SPI’s developers (both front-end and back-end) to identify compromises for gradually introducing major improvements for end users while not requiring expensive and lengthy crew retraining.

Additionally, we worked tirelessly to create a much-needed design system for the Crew Panel. I worked alongside my UX/UI designers to wade through the original, numerous and mismatched styles and assets from the original Crew Panel to create a cohesive, easy-to-use style library such that future developers can not only refer to it for easy asset collection, but in a pinch, can throw together a new feature based on the rules laid out in the style guide.