Acknowledging Changes in Crew App
ROLE & TEAM
Lead Designer with a PM, 2 Web Devs, & 2 iOS Devs at Schedaero
SUMMARY
We implemented a way for operators to communicate changes with their pilots directly in the app— eliminating phone calls and texts that may not be legally compliant.
Problem Statement
Operators needed a way to tell pilots when a particularly important change has happened in an upcoming trip. They normally text or call, but pilots aren’t supposed to take work calls when they’re getting their legally-mandated rest in between assignments. If we could give the operators a way to flag a change and know the pilot’s seen it, they could communicate more without breaking the law.
Research + Discovery
The idea was proposed multiple times by customers via feedback channels
We got feedback during the launch of the Notification Center that not all notifications are equally important. Context makes some notifications crucial, and knowing which was tribal knowledge exclusive to the dispatcher
While visiting customers onsite, we saw the specific communication breakdowns between the home office and their pilots. We’re talking paperwork emailed to an inbox with the subject line “please respond when you get this”
Open-Ended MVP
We wanted to leverage the dispatcher’s tribal knowledge and let them send a ping to the pilot for whatever they deemed necessary. We knew this would lead to pings about relevant changes before the trip went off, similar to their current inbox solution. But we were also hoping they might use the feature to ping pilots about paperwork they had forgotten to do after a trip.
Initial designs involved a simple modal, leg selector, and free-text spot. I figured we’d learn a lot by looking at what they put in the free-text.
Web Handoff & Responding on iOS
After the dispatcher writes up the message, the pilot gets a notification immediately. But we paused when considering what the pilot’s expectations were once they got the notification. Since we’re trying to replace dispatchers sending pdfs of trip sheets on email, we wanted them to review the in-app itinerary like they would the pdf. To that end, I considered forcing the user to scroll down to the bottom of the itinerary before they could acknowledge, but user testing showed that pilots would just swipe as quickly as possible, like they might a terms & conditions document. By attaching the note and the Acknowledge button at the top, I saw pilots would stop to read the note, acknowledge it, then scroll to the location of the change — retaining more information than when we forced them to scroll.
Listening to Customer Feedback
We launched the feature company wide, but some operators were more eager than others to try it. When interviewing a customer who had not adopted the workflow, she told me the location where you triggered the modal to send the message had led her to believe the acknowledgement was only to be used at initial assignment.
Discovering this might be the cause of our lower adoption, we went back to our developers and wrote up a ticket to have the trigger be placed in the Overview as well as our current spot — leading to much higher usage.
While the devs got to work, I also triaged the situation by adding a pendo guide giving users examples of the varieties of updates your could send with this tool.
Outcomes & Impact
x notifications were sent within a month of launch
dispatchers’ prompting led to an increase in x flight logs and y duty logs
crew app usage saw an overall increase of x% due to the push notification prompting