Front of House
Pre-security teams at or around the front counter
Gate Agents
Boarding gate teams responsible for assisting
Loading Crews
Behind-the-scenes at the airport, handling and loading checked luggage and food/drink
In-Flight Crews
Flight attendants responsible for the in-flight experience and safety
Diagram displaying our 4 primary crew members (end users) and their major 
and minor 
roles across a passenger’s journey.
As a platform, BlueEye needed to enable each crewmember to swiftly conduct their duties, essentially a be-all, end-all platform.
Duties across roles included:
In addition to facilitating crew tasks, BlueEye needed to give crews the ability to communicate with each other, with corporate, and with customers:
Setting the functional architecture
Part of discovery occurred on-site at JFK, shadowing grounds crew and observing their tasks. One of the coolest things (and stressful, by proximity) I got to do was go up to the control tower.
We got a chance to see the suite of apps crew used to conduct operations. Switching between up to ten, yes ten, different platforms to achieve complete awareness to get a plane emptied (on arrival), fully boarded, loaded and out of the gate — a process called turnover.
Because of turnover, the majority of tasks on-the-ground was governed by the flight that any given crew member was working — regardless of check-in, gate operations or loading crews; in-flight crews also follow this model as providing service to the flight itself is their core task.
The overall application architecture for BlueEye
BlueEye’s application framework closely mirrored the crew’s needs, with the majority of operations centering around flight ops with the goal of achieving on-time performance.
Digging into the UX
Crew members needed an on-screen experience that would allow them to task focus. Tasks associated with managing flights, however, come with a great deal of information to consume, associate together, adjust and verify.
Most any crewmember’s immediate tasks are associated with the flight they are working at any given time and the app needed to maintain this contextualization at all times, and so flight information (and any primary contextualization in-app) is persistently displayed in the left column.
The majority of operation within that context is then kept to the tabbed right column, which would host BlueEye modules that together provide a holistic informational and task management view for end-users.
A selection of wireframes from the project:
Similar Projects
