Boris Soliz
UI Designer
The GE Research and Design team reached out to my team to get some help on helping to redefine what a future cockpit could look like for business airline jets. I was assigned to be the Main Senior Visual designer for this project. I worked closely with the product manager as well as one Interaction Designer and the engineering team from the inception of the project until it was developed and piloted to pilots 🤓. I developed a full design system based on research and testing of the system on virtual machines replicating a cockpit.
The main problem we were trying to solve was the current way of addressing system failures on their airplanes. In order to fully understand the key pain points of the pilots, we held two user-centered design sessions with the pilots and stakeholders to gain insight on the challenges they are facing. . Based on initial discoveries, I quickly sketched out ideas on what these systems could look like.
After the first initial session with the pilots, we really gained some more insight into not only their fuel systems and what they needed to see, but the overall experience of the stressful situation the pilots have to go through when warnings arise during their flights. We embarked on designing future looking cockpit screens that we could develop and test with the pilots.
They currently use a paper-based solution which, in an extremely stressful situation, is not ideal given timing is of the essence. This helped us understand what the major challenges were and how we can address it using a more digitized approach, aka, a future-looking cockpit with intelligent warning systems that allows them to take action on their airplanes via the screen instead of having to pull out their printed manuals or swipe through pages of PDF’s on their tablets.
Along side with the Interaction Designer on the Project, I explored various different solutions on how to display warning signs, how and where the warning messages would be displayed, what the screens could look like and introduced new ways of interacting with the plane using touch displays and visual queues, etc. A full design system was created based on research and testing of the system on virtual machines replicating a cockpit.
After various iterations and testing, we came up with a good solution which I presented the findings and recommendations for visual aesthetics to the pilots and stakeholders during our workout to evaluate and see if what we came up with exceded their needs.
The designs and system we came up with met their needs and we started to develop the screens some more based on constructive feedback from the pilots. This is when the engineers started to implement the screens I created onto an actual demo-able simulator.
Our client was thrilled and impressed with what we had come up with. The entire team was also awarded patents on the system, including my designs. The design system I created for Purple Sky also helped one of my fellow co-designers design future looking screens for a military client.
The designs and system we came up with met their needs and we started to develop the screens some more based on constructive feedback from the pilots. This is when the engineers started to implement the screens I created onto an actual demo-able simulator.
