Aviation Finance Apps | Fatema Motiwala

Aviation Finance Applications

During my 9-week Summer Internship Program, I was the sole UI/UX Designer, leading the design for 3 distinct B2B SaaS Applications, and successfully completing the design of an entire application within a span of just 2 months.

As the sole UI/UX Designer at MBA Aviation, a global consulting leader in the aviation industry, I was responsible for nearly all aspects of UX and product design.

I worked on a total of 3 distinct projects, each aimed at solving different business problems using various UX techniques.

1. Redbook Asset Manager (RAM)

“How can we effectively manage the complexity of aircraft and engine leases?”

Lease management in Aviation can be quite complex, depending on a lot of factors and involving many different stakeholders. Asset Managers handle multiple leases at a time using Excel Spreadsheets, however, multiple user interviews led to the discovery of challenges in the current approach.

KEY CHALLENGES

Lack of Automation: Leases, with critical data dependent on numerous variables, entail high-priority tasks for asset managers, often leading to time-consuming and costly manual data retrieval.
Fragmented Stakeholder Control: Various actions to maintain the lease are performed by different stakeholders, often from different organizations. Centralizing lease management control with the asset manager, not only makes the process longer but hinders its seamlessness.
Inconsistent Handling: Asset managers adopt various styles in managing leases, resulting in a lack of consistency and complicating the hand-off process.
Tracking of Changes: Leases can evolve, but recording and tracking these changes within an Excel sheet is exceedingly difficult.
Document Disorganization: Aircraft leases involve numerous documents, and without a central repository, it becomes challenging to track and manage them effectively.

"Create a lease management tool that ensures simplicity, user-friendliness, and consistency, saving significant time and effort for stakeholders managing aviation leases, while maximizing efficiency."

DESIGN PROCESS

Within a span of 2 months, I conducted the end-to-end design for RAM right from

understanding the problem,
interviewing users,
collaborating with stakeholders from development & marketing,
low and mid-fidelity designs with continuous user feedback
prototyping 25+ high-fidelity screens with a component library, and developer hand-off.

Since it was an internal tool, I was continuously able to test and receive feedback from users at every stage, which greatly helped the designs.

The process was iterative, with different functionalities being discussed iteratively, and design work being done in parallel for each feature discussed.

KEY UX CONSIDERATIONS

Since the tool was going to integrate with the company’s existing SaaS platform, it had to match the visual language. However, since there was no design system in place, solving the challenge of making the new module look modern, consistent, and seamlessly integrated into the existing system was an interesting problem to address.
Even though we initially started as an internal module, the future business direction was to launch it as an Aviation Lease Management product in the market. It was crucial to ensure that the product remained general and not overly customized to the company’s practices.
The platform handled a complex process, so at each stage and in every design decision, I had to collaborate closely with the development team to assess the technical feasibility of the design.
Given the complexities involved in aviation leases, I also had to ensure that the tool did not become overly complicated with excessive specific features and customizations.

At every stage, I ensured to ask these 3 simple questions which helped me guide my design decisions.

“Would someone working at another aviation lease managing firm understand this?”
“What are the development costs for doing this?”
“Is there an easier way of handling this problem?”

SOLUTION

Taking the key challenges into consideration, here are some of the features of the final solution. Every design decision made was well-informed, considering user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility.

One-view for all your leases

The dashboard homepage displays dynamic information, welcoming the user and providing an overall view of the assets.

This single view helps the user easily understand the status of all their leases and prioritizes the important actions that need to be taken by the user.

Control Access using RBAC

The roles of Reporter and Reader were added to ensure that not all responsibilities fell on the Asset Manager. Instead, specific actions like adding a utilization report or attaching an invoice are directly performed by other stakeholders. ‍

This not only ensures seamlessness in the process but also accountability among different stakeholders, making it easier for the Asset Manager.

Seamless Lease Creation using Wizard

Leases are lengthy and contain numerous fields and variables. A straightforward step wizard streamlines the lease creation process by categorizing information.

Furthermore, users can easily click on a lease to edit the information, and all changes are logged in the system.

Easing the Complicated Steps

Some steps, such as uploading the utilization history of every component of an aircraft, can become very complex due to numerous variables. However, during interviews, I discovered that entering information into an Excel file is much easier and faster than using a complex web interface.

So for such complicated steps, the decision was made to simply provide a sample Excel file and ask the user to upload it. Feedback was provided to the user if something was missing in the file or if it had an incorrect format.

2. Redesigning REDBOOK

REDBOOK is mba Aviation’s subscription-based platform that gives access to commercial aircraft and engines values data containing detailed statistic sections for every aircraft model, generating ARR of millions of dollars.

Some of my redesign work related to the following:

Enhancing navigation for improved readability and customization
Ensuring seamless consistency across pages
Implementing refined color schemes while maintaining brand identity
Incorporating modern components into the interface
Streamlining by removing unused or redundant features
Enhancing the discoverability of information

AEROLYTICS - DASHBOARD

I also briefly worked on a dashboarding tool within REDBOOK, exploring different layouts of representing visual information. Decisions here were taken by collaborating with product owners and marketing team.

KEY CHALLENGE & LEARNING

REDBOOK is the primary platform of the organization, containing critical data that impacts millions of dollars. Therefore, any changes in the redesign had to be both safe and minimal. Additionally, clients were accustomed to a specific usage pattern, and I couldn't make significant alterations to how information was presented. I realized that changes at this scale needed to be incremental.

What informed my design decisions?

I spoke with stakeholders to understand how the system is used and identify the primary user goals. I also took the time to understand the different user types who utilize the system.
I maintained the brand identity as much as possible along with giving it a modern look.
To grasp feature usage and prioritize information, I sought to identify patterns within the usage data collected by the data science team.
I also assisted in setting up survey questions on the platform using Intercom, which would aid the company in analyzing the effectiveness of my changes.

3. Safety Management Solution (SMS)

MBA Aviation's Safety Management System was a new platform they aimed to develop. It served as a safety workflow system for Path 135 operators, which encompassed commercial on-demand operators primarily dealing with private jets. Currently, the process relies heavily on paper-based procedures, and given the implementation of stricter standards, it became essential for such operators to adopt an automated safety system.

For this platform, subject experts and product owners conducted most of the research and groundwork, focusing on the requirements, use cases, and workflows that needed integration into the system.

MY ROLE

My primary role was to transform the complex processes of a primarily paper-based workflow system into a technical SaaS platform. Initially, I participated in stakeholder meetings to simplify the process and emphasize the user needs and platform flow. Subsequently, I created high-fidelity concepts for the solution.

DESIGN SYSTEM

Development decisions were made to utilize a Bootstrap theme library. We opted for Metronic 8 by KeenThemes because of its extensive library, support, and the availability of a Figma Design System package.

After all the flows were streamlined, I proceeded to create the interface for the solution. Due to the limited timeframe of only 2 weeks, I directly moved on to designing high-fidelity concepts for the platform. The use of a Design System accelerated the wireframing process.

SOLUTION

The platform consisted of four different workflows for raising a form/request, and we identified reusable components throughout those flows. I decided to design a high-fidelity concept for one key workflow using the design system components, which would help the team proceed with the other flows in a similar manner.

The processes here were very complex, and it was necessary for the interfaces to be as simple as possible.

My Learnings at mba Aviation

I thoroughly enjoyed being the principal designer for all kinds of UX problems at the company.

From designing logos to collaborating with different teams and presenting my designs, I wore many hats at once.
Working on B2B products demanded a deep understanding of complex business processes and goals. In addition to advocating for users, it was equally important to consider the business objectives.
Thinking about aspect ratios, technical feasibility, and development hand-offs at every stage of the process.
Balancing the creation of new designs while preserving the brand identity.

What would I have done differently?

Since I had only 9 weeks, and the goals and outcomes for the products were already decided, I couldn't conduct extensive user research from the initial phase. I would have preferred to gather more insights from individuals outside the organization to validate my designs.

Additionally, since there was no existing design system in place, I would have liked to create a comprehensive design system for REDBOOK to enhance consistency and guide future design decisions. While I attempted to establish style guides and component libraries for the various applications and designs I developed, building a comprehensive design system would have been the preferred approach.